MIT engineers have created soft, 3-D-printed structures whose movements can be controlled with a wave of a magnet, much like marionettes without the strings.
The menagerie of structures that can be magnetically manipulated includes a smooth ring that wrinkles up, a long tube that squeezes shut, a sheet that folds itself, and a spider-like “grabber” that can crawl, roll, jump, and snap together fast enough to catch a passing ball. It can even be directed to wrap itself around a small pill and carry it across a table.
The researchers fabricated each structure from a new type of 3-D-printable ink that they infused with tiny magnetic particles. They fitted an electromagnet around the nozzle of a 3-D printer, which caused the magnetic particles to swing into a single orientation as the ink was fed through the nozzle. By controlling the magnetic orientation of individual sections in the structure, the researchers can produce structures and devices that can almost instantaneously shift into intricate formations, and even move about, as the various sections respond to an external magnetic field.
In biomedicine this technique will find promising applications. we could put a structure around a blood vessel to control the pumping of blood, or use a magnet to guide a device through the GI tract to take images, extract tissue samples, clear a blockage, or deliver certain drugs to a specific location. You can design, simulate, and then just print to achieve various functions.
The team’s magnetically activated structures fall under the general category of soft actuated devices — squishy, moldable materials that are designed to shape-shift or move about through a variety of mechanical means.
Instead of making structures with magnetic particles of the same, uniform orientation, the team looked for ways to create magnetic “domains” — individual sections of a structure, each with a distinct orientation of magnetic particles.
The team developed a printing platform and a predictive model for others to use. People can design their own structures and domain patterns, validate them with the model, and print them to actuate various functions. By programming complex information of structure, domain, and magnetic field, one can even print intelligent machines such as robots.
News Source: http://news.mit.edu/2018/magnetic-3-d-printed-structures-crawl-roll-jump-play-catch-0613
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