Latest Electroactive polymers Stories
[186 Pages] Energy Harvesting Market Report segments the market by geographies such as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of the World. (PRWEB) March 24, 2013 According to a new market research report, “Energy Harvesting Market- Global Forecast and Analysis (2012-2017) By Technology, Application & Geography published by MarketsandMarkets, the total market is expected to reach $1894.87 million by 2017, at a CAGR of 24.31%. Browse 70 Market Data Tables 22 Figures 186...
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley, have developed an elegant and powerful new microscale actuator that can flex like a tiny beckoning finger. Based on an oxide material that expands and contracts dramatically in response to a small temperature variation, the actuators are smaller than the width of a human hair and are promising for...
Yarn muscles could power robots, micromotors, intelligent textiles New artificial muscles made from nanotech yarns and infused with paraffin wax can lift more than 100,000 times their own weight and generate 85 times more mechanical power during contraction than the same size natural muscle, according to scientists at The University of Texas at Dallas and their international team from Australia, China, South Korea, Canada and Brazil. The artificial muscles are yarns constructed from...
Biocompatible material created at Harvard is much tougher than cartilage A team of experts in mechanics, materials science, and tissue engineering at Harvard have created an extremely stretchy and tough gel that may pave the way to replacing damaged cartilage in human joints. Called a hydrogel, because its main ingredient is water, the new material is a hybrid of two weak gels that combine to create something much stronger. Not only can this new gel stretch to 21 times its original...
DALLAS, May 24, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- According to a new market research report, "Global Electroactive Polymers Market Trends, Applications and Forecasts (2012 - 2017)" published by MarketsandMarkets (http://www.marketsandmarkets.com), the total market for Electro-active Polymers is expected to reach $3.4 billion by 2017. Browse 69 market data tables spread through more than 290 pages and in-depth TOC on "Global Electroactive Polymers Market Trends, Applications and...
Researchers from the University of Bristol have created artificial muscles that can be transformed at the flick of a switch to mimic the remarkable camouflaging abilities of organisms such as squid and zebrafish. They demonstrate two individual transforming mechanisms that they believe could be used in 'smart clothing' to trigger camouflaging tricks similar to those seen in nature. The study is published today, 2 May, in IOP Publishing's journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, and is...
It may be difficult to imagine, but pouring juice into a plastic cup can be a great challenge to a robot. While one hand holds the glass bottle firmly, the other one must gently grasp the cup. Researchers at Saarland University together with associates in Bologna and Naples have developed a robotic hand that can accomplish both tasks with ease and yet including the actuators is scarcely larger than a human arm. This was made possible by a novel string actuator, making use of small electric...
"Perhaps the earliest public demonstration of an electric motor," writes a team of researchers from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, "involved the automatic rotation of a turkey on a spit over a fire" at a party put on by Benjamin Franklin in 1749. Franklin's electrostatic motor was self-commutating, meaning that it was able to provide a continuous torque while it turned without requiring external electronics to control its progress. Using artificial muscles, hyper-elastic materials...
Battery technology hasn't kept pace with advancements in portable electronics, but the race is on to fix this. One revolutionary concept being pursued by a team of researchers in New Zealand involves creating "wearable energy harvesters" capable of converting movement from humans or found in nature into battery power.A class of variable capacitor generators known as "dielectric elastomer generators" (DEGs) shows great potential for wearable energy harvesting. In fact,...
MENLO PARK, Calif., April 4, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- An article in the January 2011 issue of the journal Science commemorates the anniversary of a smart material technology first described a decade ago in the same publication. In 2000, SRI researchers published a research paper introducing electroactive polymer artificial muscle (EPAM), a unique smart material technology SRI developed. "The 2000 study in Science was the first to report new EPAM materials and configurations with actuator...
