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Berkeley, Calif., Dec.17,2012Researchers 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 microfluidics, drug delivery, and artificial muscles.
"We believe our microactuator is more efficient and powerful than any current microscale actuation technology, including human muscle cells," says Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley scientist Junqiao Wu. "What's more, it uses this very interesting materialvanadium dioxideand tells us more about the fundamental materials science of phase transitions."
Wu is corresponding author of a paper appearing in Nano Letters this month that reports these findings, titled "Giant-Amplitude, High-Work Density Microactuators with Phase Transition Activated Nanolayer Bimorphs." As often happens in science, Wu and his colleagues arrived at the microactuator idea by accident, while studying a different problem.
Vanadium dioxide is a textbook example of a strongly correlated material, meaning the behavior of each electron is inextricably tied to its neighboring electrons. The resulting exotic electronic behaviors have made vanadium dioxide an object of scientific scrutiny for decades, much of it focused on an unusual pair of phase transitions.
When heated past 67 degrees Celsius, vanadium dioxide transforms from an insulator to a metal, accompanied by a structural phase transition that shrinks the material in one dimension while expanding in the other two. For decades, researchers have debated whether one of these phase transitions drives the other or if they are separate phenomena that coincidentally occur at the sam
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| Contact: Alison Hatt ajhatt@lbl.gov 510-495-2391 DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Source:Eurekalert |
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