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MEAM Seminar: “Soft-Matter Engineering for Robotics and Wearables”

September 14, 2021 at 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Details
Date: September 14, 2021
Time: 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Event Category: Seminar
  • Event Tags:
  • Organizer
    Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics
    Phone: 215-746-1818
    Venue
    Zoom – Email MEAM for Link peterlit@seas.upenn.edu

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    Progress in soft lithography and soft materials integration have led to extraordinary new classes of soft-matter sensors, circuits, and transducers. These material technologies are composed almost entirely out of soft matter – elastomers, gels, and conductive fluids like eutectic gallium-indium (EGaIn) – and represent the building blocks for machines and electronics that are soft, flexible, and stretchable. Because of their intrinsic compliance and elasticity, such devices can be incorporated into soft, biologically-inspired robots or be worn on the body and operate continuously without impairing natural body motion. In this talk, I will review recent contributions from my research group in creating soft multifunctional materials for wearable electronics and soft robotics using these emerging practices in “soft-matter engineering.” In particular, I will focus on elastomer composites and microfluidic EGaIn architectures for highly stretchable digital electronics, wearable energy harvesting, and electrically-responsive actuation. When possible, I will relate the design and operation of these soft-matter technologies to underlying principles of soft matter physics and practices in controls and machine. In addition to presenting my own research in the field, I will also briefly review broader efforts and emerging challenges in utilizing soft multifunctional materials for applications in wearable electronics, bioelectronic interfaces, and soft robotics.