CAREER: Understanding the Printability of Liquid Metal Dispersions for Additive Manufacturing

这项教师早期职业发展（Career）计划将研究使用液态金属的增材制造工艺。这项工作有可能使一类新的可伸缩电子设备成为软机器人、安全人机交互、主动矫形器、可穿戴接口或辅助医疗设备的平台，用于运动辅助、延长耐力和健康监测。在这个研究项目中，将通过在弹性聚合物中打印液态金属痕迹来创建具有电子功能的可拉伸复合材料。复合材料有望保留刚性金属导体的功能，同时利用塑料基体的高度变形特性。这项工作将集中在围绕液态金属加工的基本问题上，以开发可扩展的制造工艺。教育和推广活动包括为初高中学生设计的低成本，可访问和可扩展的软机器人的开发。使用液态金属分散体的增材制造将弥合成熟的可扩展液体加工（如打印）与新兴软功能材料加工之间的差距，这些材料具有高表面张力、粘度和密度特性，通常会阻碍可打印性。本项目的研究目标是推导和验证液体-金属分散体在合成、沉积和聚结过程中的基本机电行为。通过不同长度尺度的实验、理论和数值模型，液态金属在这三个加工阶段的机械响应将与它的整体电响应相耦合。这笔拨款将使我们对软机电系统可扩展材料加工的基本原理有一个基本的了解，并将显著提高我们设计变形、对环境作出反应和适应的软机器的能力。

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program grant will investigate an additive manufacturing process using liquid metal. This work has the potential to enable a new class of stretchable electronic devices to serve as platforms for soft robotics, safe human-machine interaction, active orthotics, wearable interfaces, or assistive medical devices for motion aid, prolonged endurance, and health-monitoring. In this research program, stretchable composite materials with electronic functionality will be created by printing liquid-metal traces in elastic polymers. The composite materials are expected to retain the function of rigid metal conductors while leveraging the highly deformable properties of the plastic matrix. The work will focus on the fundamental problems surrounding the processing of liquid metal in order to develop a scalable manufacturing process. The educational and outreach activities include the development of a low-cost, accessible, and scalable soft robot designed for middle- and high-school students.Additive manufacturing with liquid-metal dispersions will bridge the gap between well-established scalable liquid processing, such as printing, and the processing of emerging soft functional materials that exhibit high surface tension, viscosity, and density properties that typically preclude printability. The research objective of this project is to derive and validate the fundamental electromechanical behavior of liquid-metal dispersions during synthesis, deposition, and coalescence. The mechanical response of liquid-metal through these three processing phases will be coupled to its bulk electrical response using experiments, theories, and numerical models across different length scales. This grant will enable a fundamental understanding of the basic principles underlying scalable materials processing for soft electromechanical systems and will significantly improve our ability to design soft machines that deform, react to their environment, and adapt.