Swiss researchers have developed a technique for printing synthetic muscle tissues out of silicone. Sooner or later, these may very well be used on each people and robots.
Swiss researchers have succeeded in printing synthetic muscle tissues out of silicone. Sooner or later, the know-how may very well be used not solely in medication, but in addition in robotics.
Growing synthetic muscle tissues that may sustain with the actual ones is a serious technical problem, explains the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Supplies Science and Know-how (Empa). These should not solely be robust, but in addition elastic and comfortable.
Now, for the primary time, the researchers have developed a technique to provide such complicated parts with the 3D printer. The printed so-called dielectric elastic actuators encompass two completely different silicone-based supplies: a conductive electrode materials and a non-conductive dielectric.
Compressed muscle tissues have to be as comfortable as doable
These supplies interlock in layers. “It’s like interlacing your fingers,” explains Empa researcher Patrick Danner. If {an electrical} voltage is utilized to the electrodes, the actuator contracts like a muscle. For those who change it off once more, it relaxes once more.
Nonetheless, the manufacturing will not be a simple enterprise. It’s because the printed “muscle tissues” have to be as comfortable as doable in order that {an electrical} stimulus can result in the required deformation. So as to have the ability to produce one thing with the 3D printer, sure standards should even be met: The supplies should liquefy below strain in order that they are often pressed out of the printer nozzle. Instantly afterwards, nonetheless, they have to be viscous sufficient once more to retain the printed kind. “These traits are sometimes in direct contradiction to one another,” says Danner. “For those who optimise considered one of them, three others change, normally to the detriment.”
Sooner or later, you could possibly print an entire coronary heart like this
In collaboration with researchers at ETH Zurich, Danner and Dorina Opris, head of the analysis group, have succeeded in reconciling many of those contradictory traits.
With the method they’ve newly developed, not solely complicated shapes could be printed, but in addition lengthy elastic fibers. “If we make them a bit thinner, we come fairly near how actual muscle fibers work,” says Opris. Sooner or later, it could even be doable to print a whole coronary heart from such fibers, the researcher believes.
