Smart material

About: Smart material is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3704 publications have been published within this topic receiving 74280 citations. The topic is also known as: intelligent material & responsive material.

Digital fabrication of smart structures and mechanism: Creative applications in art and design

Abstract: A peer-reviewed conference paper given at the Digital Fabrication: methods, tooling and processes panel at the Digital Fabrication 2011 Conference, NIP 27, 27th International Conference on Digital Printing Technologies. This paper describes the design and fabrication of novel “soft” structures and mechanisms employing “smart” shape-changing materials. These structures and mechanisms incorporate shape memory alloy (SMA) micro-actuators, enabling them to exhibit lifelike movement when stimulated by the application of electric current. Fabricated by 3D printing in a soft elastomer material, their design includes internal channels into which the SMA actuators are easily mounted. Other design features allow flexibility of movement and facilitate cooling of the SMA actuators. A tentacle-like active structure is described, which incorporates an antagonistic pair of SMA microactuators, allowing it to exhibit two-way motion. Results are presented for the speed and range of motion of the tentacle-like structure. The paper goes on to describe a creative arts application for smart active structures and mechanisms which exploits the technologies under investigation: an interactive puppet which exhibits lifelike, expressive movement. This research in digital fabrication and smart materials has implications for the fields of interactive and robotic art and design, soft robotics and physical computing.

Bifunctional FePt@MWCNTs/Ru Nanoarchitectures: Synthesis and Characterization

Abstract: The synthesis of novel nanoarchitectures is an important way to combine several properties into the same nanometric object. Magnetic, catalytic, optical, and electrical properties can be embedded and used for heating, moving, or monitoring the nanocomposite. Following this approach, smart materials exhibiting remarkable properties could be obtained. Several nanocomposites are based on carbon nanotubes (CNTs). Because of the presence of empty cavities and very large surface external area, this allotropic form of carbon is especially suitable for this purpose and particularly for catalytic applications. In this work, a new general strategy to synthesize by a wet method three-block, smart nanocomposites based on MWCNTs is described. The new bifunctional material is shortly referred to as FePt@MWCNTs/Ru(NPs) to point out that nanoparticles (NPs) of a magnetically soft alloy (FePt fcc) fill the MWCNTs cavity, whereas catalytic Ru NPs decorate the external wall. In this way well separated catalytic and magnetic...

Application of Smart Materials to Wireless ID Tags and Remote Sensors

Abstract: Material structures having an electromagnetic or magnetomechanical resonance can be excited or detected remotely using an antenna. Incorporating smart materials into such structures provides new opportunities to encode ID and sensor information in the electromagnetic signature of the “tag.” In this way, it is possible to create tags which not only have a unique ID but which can also respond to local changes in their environment (e. g. force, temperature, light, etc.). This principle forms the basis for a low-cost wireless ID and wireless sensor technology which has many potential applications in manufacturing, inventory control, security, surveillance, and new human-computer interfaces. As a means of illustrating this concept, two simple examples are given: a force sensor incorporating a piezoelectric polymer and a relative position sensor which incorporates a magnetoelastic amorphous metal ribbon.

Study of induced strain transfer in piezoceramic smart material systems

Abstract: Smart materials such as piezoceramics are being used as actuators and sensors to achieve active control of elastic deformations of structures. Intelligent structures, with highly distributed actuators and sensors, can be designed with intrinsic vibration and shape control capabilities. Piezoceramics can be integrated with a structure either by being embedded within or bonded onto the structure. Particularly for the case of surface bonding, it is important to have an effective strain transfer from the smart material to the metallic substrate through the adhesive layer. In this paper, study of the strain transfer of piezoceramic actuators bonded to the surface of a structure with a finite-thickness adhesive bond is presented. A structure with actuators bonded to the top and bottom surfaces of a cantilever beam, which can deform in either bending or extension, is analysed. A detailed two-dimensional model of the structure is developed to study this strain transfer through an adhesive layer using the finite-difference method to solve the equations of elasticity, with appropriate boundary conditions. The resulting strains in the actuator and those induced in the substructure are compared with a finite-element model and two existing one-dimensional analytical models. The limitations of the simplified analytical models are brought out. The uniform-strain analytical model was found to be in agreement with the numerical models only for the case of extension actuation. The Bernoulli-Euler analytical bending model agreed with the numerical models only at points near the center of the structure. The finite-difference and finite-element models were in agreement in almost all cases. For the case of bending actuation, the finite-difference and finite-element methods differed in their predictions of induced strains.