GOALI: Paper-based Skin

皮肤是人体最大的器官，对于人与环境的互动和生存至关重要，然而类人、假肢和可穿戴设备仍然缺乏类似的感觉设备和保护。理想的人造皮肤必须灵活、可伸缩、易于包裹在四肢上，能够检测周围物体的触摸和力，并防止或限制微生物的传播。用于检测触摸、压力和冲击的空间分布的大面积皮肤状传感器将用于从民用基础设施到假肢、机器人到地面和航空航天飞行器的结构健康监测等许多应用。为了实现这些未来的应用，建议的工作将包括设计规则，以帮助工程师扩大压印光刻和合成皮肤卷对卷加工的组装。轻质、廉价的外壳将防止危及生命的灾难，例如那些与未被发现的结构损坏有关的灾难（例如，哥伦比亚号航天飞机上松动的瓦片造成的灾难性撞击损伤）。活性抗菌保护将在无菌或污染环境中对机器人、机器或可穿戴服装进行消毒。工业和艺术合作者将为研究团队提供材料和指导，以实现商业上可行的加工和组装。本科生和高中生将有机会通过参加罗格斯大学荣誉学院、伯恩研讨会、阿雷斯蒂研究中心和新泽西州州长工程与技术学院，制作具有皮肤传感功能的纸质设备。这项GOALI提案的研究目标是创建可伸缩的、类似皮肤的传感装置，该装置由可调的纸基复合材料制成，具有感应触摸、测量力的空间分布和提供等离子体消毒的能力。制造的装置将包括压纹压阻纸夹在两层金属化纸之间。传感机制将是被动的，并与一系列附加电极连接。一个中心假设是，在含有导电纳米填料的纤维素基复合材料中，接近临界/渗透阈值的可调孔隙率将在机械弹性和塑性应变状态下主导机电性能的大转变。具体任务将包括：(i)可调压阻纸的制造和压印光刻；（ii）模拟桥接介观和纳米尺度的纸基复合材料的电学特性；（iii）机械建模和表征，以建立压印光刻的设计规则；（四）金属化纸等离子体消毒器的消毒机理；(5)多层纸基材料的堆叠集成，用于触觉、压力和等离子体灭菌的组合感应。

Skin, the largest organ of the human body, is essential for human-environment interactions and survival, yet humanoids, prosthetics, and wearable devices continue to lack comparable sensory devices and protection. An ideal synthetic skin must be flexible, scalable, easy to wrap around limbs, able to detect touch and force from surrounding objects, and protect against or limit the spread of microbes. Large-area, skin-like sensors for detecting spatial distributions of touch, pressure, and impact will be useful for a number of applications ranging from civil infrastructure to prosthetics to robotics to structural health monitoring of ground and aerospace vehicles. To enable these future applications, the proposed work will include design rules to aid engineers in scaling up imprint lithography and assembly for roll-to-roll processing of synthetic skins. Lightweight, inexpensive skin will prevent life-threatening disasters, such as those linked to undetected structural damage (e.g., the catastrophic impact damage from loose tiles on space shuttle Columbia). The active antimicrobial protection will sterilize robots, machines, or wearable garments in sterile or contaminated environments. The industrial and artistic collaborators will provide materials and guidance to the research team working toward commercially viable processing and assembly. Undergraduate and high school students will have opportunities to build paper-based devices with skin-like sensing through their participation in the Rutgers Honors College, Byrne Seminars, Aresty Research Center, and the New Jersey Governor's School of Engineering and Technology. The research objective of this GOALI proposal is to create scalable, skin-like sensing devices made of tunable paper-based composites with capabilities of sensing touch, measuring spatial distributions of forces, and providing plasma-based sterilization. The fabricated devices will consist of embossed piezoresistive paper sandwiched between two layers of metallized paper. The sensing mechanisms will be passive and interface with an array of attached electrodes. A central hypothesis is that tunable porosity near a critical/percolation threshold in cellulose-based composites containing conductive nanofillers that will dominate large transitions in electromechanical properties in both mechanically elastic and plastic regimes of strain. The specific tasks will include (i) fabrication and imprint lithography of tunable, piezoresistive paper; (ii) modeling electrical properties in paper-based composites bridging the meso and nano scales; (iii) mechanical modeling and characterization to establish design rules for imprint lithography; (iv) disinfecting mechanisms of plasma-based sterilizers with metallized paper; and (v) stacked integration of multiple layers of paper-based materials for combined sensing of touch, pressure, and plasma-based sterilization.