Artificial Muscles from Fishing Line and Sewing Thread

By Carter S. Haines, M. Lima, Na Li, G. Spinks, J. Foroughi, John D. W. Madden, Shi Hyeong Kim, S. Fang, M. Jung de Andrade, F. Göktepe and 11 more. Science, 2014

1,234 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Toward an Artificial Muscle In designing materials for artificial muscles, the goals are to find those that will combine high strokes, high efficiency, long cycle life, low hysteresis, and low cost. Now, Haines et al. (p. 868; see the Perspective by Yuan and Poulin) show that this is possible. Twisting high-strength, readily available polymer fibers, such as those used for fishing lines or sewing thread, to the point where they coil up, allowed construction of highly efficient actuators that could be triggered by a number of stimuli. Polymer fibers can be transformed into highly efficient artificial muscles through the application of extreme twist. [Also see Perspective by Yuan and Poulin] The high cost of powerful, large-stroke, high-stress artificial muscles has combined with performance limitations such as low cycle life, hysteresis, and low efficiency to restrict applications. We demonstrated that inexpensive high-strength polymer fibers used for fishing line and sewing thread can be easily transformed by twist insertion to provide fast, scalable, nonhysteretic, long-life tensile and torsional muscles. Extreme twisting produces coiled muscles that can contract by 49%, lift loads over 100 times heavier than can human muscle of the same length and weight, and generate 5.3 kilowatts of mechanical work per kilogram of muscle weight, similar to that produced by a jet engine. Woven textiles that change porosity in response to temperature and actuating window shutters that could help conserve energy were also demonstrated. Large-stroke tensile actuation was theoretically and experimentally shown to result from torsional actuation.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8fe040a5974a254d4a324aa541a7ec685da9abeb

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Citations in the corpus

Materials that couple sensing, actuation, computation, and communication (2015, background): “An artificial muscle made from fishing line or conductive sewing thread is described in (54).”
Pouch Motors: Printable Soft Actuators Integrated with Computational Design (2015, neutral): “Mh(h)1⁄4P dVh d/h 1⁄4P dVh=dh d/h=dh (15)”
Fluid-driven origami-inspired artificial muscles (2017, background): “Similar to SMAs, this twisted fiber-based muscle is thermally driven; thus, its energy conversion efficiency is low (<2%) relative to natural muscles (40%) (12).”