Johannes T.B. Overvelde's blog

A PhD position is available in the Soft Robotic Matter group @AMOLF, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The PhD focusses on the development of a complete soft artificial biocompatible heart. For more information and to apply, please visit the AMOLF website.

Advances in fabrication technologies are enabling the production of architected materials with unprecedented properties. Most such materials are characterized by a fixed geometry, but in the design of some materials it is possible to incorporate internal mechanisms capable of reconfiguring their spatial architecture, and in this way to enable tunable functionality.

A range of instabilities can occur in soft bodies that undergo large deformation. While most of them arise under compressive forces, it has previously been shown analytically that a tensile instability can occur in an elastic block subjected to equitriaxial tension. Guided by this result, we conducted centimeter-scale experiments on thick elastomeric samples under generalized plane strain conditions and observed for the first time this elastic tensile instability.

Engineering actuators with capabilities that match and even exceed those found in nature, is a long-standing challenge. While traditional actuators are built with hard materials, it has been recently shown that elastomeric materials enable the design of fluidic actuators that are lightweight, inexpensive, easy to fabricate, and able to undergo large deformation and complex motions. However, these actuators typically rely on large volumes for their actuation.