Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas have created powerful unipolar electrochemical muscles,
For more than 15 years, researchers fromThe University of Texas at Dallas and their counterparts in the United States, Australia, South Korea, and China have made artificial muscles by twisting and winding carbon nanotubes or polymer strands. When temperatures change, these muscles work, contracting their length when heated and returning to their original length when cooled. However, they have their limitations.
Electrochemically controlled carbon nanotube (CNT ) muscles are an alternative approach to creating fast, powerful, artificial muscles that can be applied in robotics and other fields.
Electrochemically controlled muscles are particularly promising because their energy conversion efficiency is not limited by a thermodynamic limit: they canshrink more and also withstand heavy loads without consuming much energy.
First, muscle excitation is bipolar, meaning that muscle movement, expansion, or contraction altersThe potential at which the turn changes The direction is the zero-charge potential, and the rate at which the potential changes over time is the potential scanning rate.
Another question: this electrolyte is stable only in a certain voltage range. Outside this range, the electrolyte is destroyed.
To solve these problems, the researchers found that the inner surfaces of the helical filaments of carbon nanotubes canbe coated with a specific ionic polymer that contains either positively or negatively charged chemical groups.
This polymer coating converts the bipolar excitation of the carbon nanotube filaments into unipolar excitation when the muscle actsThe number of solvent molecules pumped into the muscle by each ion increases with the potential scanning rate for some unipolar muscles, this increaseseffective dimensions.
Thus, muscle travel can be increased by 3.8times with an increase in the potential scanning speed, while the muscle movement from a carbon nanotube without a polymer coating decreases 4.2 times with the same changes in the potential scanning speed.
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