Supercoiled Actuators with Liquid Metal Joule Heating : novel miniaturized actuators for pneumatic control of reconfigurable wearables

Sammanfattning: Garments serve a number of purposes, from protection and physiological comfort to social and cultural expressions. With the recent developments of active textiles, sensors and actuators with shapes and sizes similar to textiles, the real multifunctional garments have been realized. The functions of such garments can be regulating heat by changing the spacing between the strands of yarn, giving massage or assisting lifting movement by expanding and contracting one or more actuators.   This project is a part of a main project targeting on reconfigurable hybrid wearables. The main started from studying possible actuators that could have textile-like properties, where pneumatic actuators were chosen. A model of different forces, strains and braiding angles of a pneumatic actuator sometimes called a McKibben muscle was made. It should be noted that such garments with pneumatic actuators to be functional and applicable each segment needed an external pump. For local actuation, miniaturized servo valves were needed. Hence, study on super coiled actuators (SCAs) was initiated to investigate their potential of controlling the valves for constricting the flow when needed. In this project different SCAs were developed and their performances were recorded. To assist with heating of the SCAs Galinstan and Gallium were used as electric resistors to provide for Joule heating.  A contraction of over 19% and an efficiency of 0.29% were achieved but could most likely be improved by optimizing the fabrication and testing process.