12 Dec 3D morphable structures employed in microfluidic research

Abstract

“The geometric reconfigurations in three-dimensional morphable structures have a wide range of applications in flexible electronic devices and smart systems with unusual mechanical, acoustic, and thermal properties. However, achieving the highly controllable anisotropic transformation and dynamic regulation of architected materials crossing different scales remains challenging. Herein, we develop a magnetic regulation approach that provides an enabling technology to achieve the controllable transformation of morphable structures and unveil their dynamic modulation mechanism as well as potential applications. With buckling instability encoded heterogeneous magnetization profiles inside soft architected materials, spatially and temporally programmed magnetic inputs drive the formation of a variety of anisotropic morphological transformations and dynamic geometric reconfiguration. The introduction of magnetic stimulation could help to predetermine the buckling states of soft architected materials, and enable the formation of definite and controllable buckling states without prolonged magnetic stimulation input. The dynamic modulations can be exploited to build systems with switchable fluidic properties and are demonstrated to achieve capabilities of fluidic manipulation, selective particle trapping, sensitivity-enhanced biomedical analysis, and soft robotics. The work provides new insights to harness the programmable and dynamic morphological transformation of soft architected materials and promises benefits in microfluidics, programmable metamaterials, and biomedical applications.”

“The elastomer matrix exhibits reversible deswelling and expansion properties by adding solvent 1 and 2. With geometric constraints and absorption of solvent 2, the elastomeric structure could generate buckling transformation providing a template-free manner for the formation of 3D continuous heterogeneous magnetization. Diverse transformation of elastomeric structures could be achieved by using programmed magnetic inputs.” Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License from Xia, N., Jin, D., Pan, C. et al. Dynamic morphological transformations in soft architected materials via buckling instability encoded heterogeneous magnetization. Nat Commun 13, 7514 (2022).

Figures and the abstract are reproduced from Xia, N., Jin, D., Pan, C. et al. Dynamic morphological transformations in soft architected materials via buckling instability encoded heterogeneous magnetization. Nat Commun 13, 7514 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-35212-6 under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Read the original article: Dynamic morphological transformations in soft architected materials via buckling instability encoded heterogeneous magnetization