Phototunable Rayleigh 3D Soft Self‐Oscillator Enabling Versatile Biomimetic Tubular Peristaltic Pumping
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Living tubular organs can spatiotemporally and cyclically deform their muscular walls to implement adaptable and sustainable peristaltic pumping applicable to broad matter, achieved via asymmetric and non-equilibrium self-oscillating deformations of muscular walls. However, man-made tubular soft actuators have been limited to pumping a few simple matters, because of their reciprocal and monotonic wall motions that cannot break time-reversal symmetry and system equilibrium to gain adaptable and sustainable pumping. Here, a phototunable Rayleigh 3D soft self-oscillator (PR3DSSO) capable of multimodal, nonreciprocal, self-sustainable wall deformations is presented. PR3DSSO's design leverages two direction-and-dimension-phototunable tubular instabilities: snapping and postbuckling. The post-buckling instability can generate local-wall origami which cannot only fold local walls into multimodal shape-mode waves, but also break wall-motion symmetry; snapping instabilities help break equilibrium in wall motions to initiate autonomous wall motions. These phototunable-instabilities-driven wall deformations unprecedentedly create Rayleigh-like 3D wall motions, which allow for versatile biomimetic tubular peristaltic pumping adapt to broad matter. Our PR3DSSO would spur creative life-like active-material designs and novel pumping functions.
Source: Advanced Materials
Authors: Tonghui Zhao, Jiu‐an Lv
Institution: Westlake University
Language: English
Subfield: Mechanical Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Awards: 新型直写技术组装程序化形变液晶高分子柔性执行器, G7801450670
OpenAlex ID: W4409305449