Onion muscles
Physicists have created artificial muscles
made of onion and gold cages
The skin cells in ordinary bulbs can be used as the driving part of ultra-flexible artificial muscles that can contract and unclench when an electrical signal is applied, physicists who published an article in the journal Applied Physics Letters (Chen et al., Onion artificial muscles) unexpectedly found out.
"Initially, we wanted to develop a special microstructure for artificial muscles, trying to increase the degree of their compression or stretching during their work. One day, we saw pictures with the structure of onion cells and their sizes, and realized that they were about the same as what we were trying to create in the laboratory," says Wen–Pin Shih from the National Taiwan University (China).
Shih and his colleagues, guided by this idea, tried to build from the cells of the onion "peel" – a thin film covering each flake of the bulb – a kind of controlled structure that could contract and stretch.
After a series of experiments, physicists discovered an extremely simple and elegant method to carry out their plans – they cleaned the surface of the skin cells from solid cellulose using a solvent and glued two thin strips of gold foil to them. If a current is applied to one of these plates, the cells will begin to contract or stretch, acting in approximately the same way as normal muscles.
As Shih notes, the thickness of the upper and lower electrode was specially made different, so that these "onion" muscles make different movements when applying weak and strong voltage. For example, if the voltage is small, they will stretch and bend down, and at high voltage they will contract and rise up.
As a demonstration of the performance of such muscles, scientists have assembled a kind of robot manipulator, a primitive arm and forceps from two strips of such "onion" muscles, with which they successfully picked up a ball of cotton wool from the floor.
So far, such muscles are not capable of lifting more solid loads, and in the near future, Shikha's group will try to fix this problem, as well as reduce the voltage required to launch such biomuscles.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru08.05.2015