Alcohol Powered Muscles

ianchaos writes "In an article on ScienCentral News, Scientists at the University of Texas are using alcohol to power artificial muscles. From the article: 'Usually the only alcohol-powered muscles are the ones in barroom brawls, but one scientist is adding alcohol to artificial muscles to power robots and more.'"

University of Texas?

[Anonymous Coward]

The slashdot submission is wrong; the muscles are being developed at the University of Texas at Dallas. "University of Texas" is our satellite campus in Austin. >:(

Re:Not really about alcohol...

[penguin-collective]

No, that's not what "hysteresis" means. Hysteresis means that their behavior depends on their immediate history (meaning, one or two contractions earlier). Long term degradation is called something else, depending on the cause and behavior (e.g., "fatigue").

Re:Not really about alcohol...

[penguin-collective]

As I was saying: term "hysteresis" is not used to describe permanent fatigue or degradation of a material. The Wikipedia article specifically talks about "immediate history", and the new link you posted likewise gives correct examples of hysteresis, none of which involve fatigue or degradation. Shape memory alloys exhibit hysteresis and they also exhibit fatigue; the two are two distinct effects.

Hope this helps!

Re:Production Issues?

[c_fel]

Anyway this kind of technology is far far away from production. I had the chance to work with these shape memory alloys (I made a small walking robot for a resaerch project at University) , and what we can read in the article is only the good side of them. In fact there are too many downsides yet :

1. The contraction speed is very fast, but the decontraction is very slow. This is because it's really easy to heat a metal at a high speed, using eather a heat source or electricity (I used electricity cause it's simpler), but to cool it at the same speed, you would need a cool liquid to flow through the wire. And to use two liquids in alternance means that you must have a hydraulic system for each fiber you want to contract/release.

2. The article says these "muscles" are strong. This is not the case. At least they could be used to move a tiny robot insect, but if you need to put the hydraulic cooling thing, forget it.

3. It's really hard to control the exact length of the muscle. Other than "completely long" or "completely short", you have a great time setting exactly the good temperature for a specific length. That is because these muscles have a great hysteresis curve, and two temperatures can give two lengths.

4. That is enough.

For those you are interested and french speaking, here's the article I wrote on the robot I made : http://www.polymtl.ca/lrn/chenier/MuscleWires.pdf [polymtl.ca]