Researchers Develop Rubbery, Conductive Material
Posted on: Friday, 8 August 2008, 13:09 CDT
Japanese scientists claim to have developed a flexible, rubbery material that is able to conduct electricity.
Writing in the journal Science, Tsuyoshi Sekitani of the University of Tokyo says that the material could pave the way for new flexible devices that could be used on curved surfaces or even in moving parts.
His team of researchers came up with the material by combining carbon nanotubes, a long stretch of carbon molecules that can conduct electricity, with a rubbery polymer to form the material’s basic structure. Then they combined the concoction with a grid of tiny transistors.
The material was stretched to almost double its original size during test procedures. Each time, it snapped back into place without disrupting the transistors or ruining the material’s conductive properties.
The elastic conductor would allow electronic circuits to be mounted in places that would have been impossible up to now, including "arbitrary curved surfaces and movable parts, such as the joints of a robot's arm," Sekitani and colleagues wrote.
Earlier this week, a U.S. team reported developing an elastic mesh material that allowed them to use standard electronics materials to build an electronic eye camera based on the shape and layout of the human eye.
John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who wrote about the eye camera in the journal Nature, said the development of materials that can be shaped and molded to curved surfaces will allow for a whole new class of electronics devices that can be used to better interact with the human body, such as brain monitoring devices.
Source: redOrbit staff and wire reports
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