Abstract
The unique motion of amoeba with a deformable body has long been an intriguing issue in scientific fields ranging from physics, bionics to mechanics. So far, most of the currently available artificial machines are still hard to achieve the complicated amoeba-like behaviors including stretching pseudopodia. Here through introducing a multi-materials system, we discovered a group of very unusual biomimetic amoeba-like behaviors of self-fueled liquid gallium alloy on the graphite surface immersed in alkaline solution. The underlying mechanisms were discovered to be the surface tension variations across the liquid metal droplet through its simultaneous electrochemical interactions with aluminum and graphite in the NaOH electrolyte. This finding would shed light on the packing and the structural design of future soft robots owning diverse deformation capability. Moreover, this study related the physical transformation of a non-living LM droplet to the life behavior of amoeba in nature, which is inspiring in human’s pursuit of advanced biomimetic machine.
Highlights
The cognition and imitation of the unique movements of the biological system has always been the core pursuit for scientists from diverse fields such as physics[1,2,3,4,5], biology[6,7,8] and engineering[8,9,10,11,12] etc
The basic behaviors take place when the liquid metal (LM) droplet was amalgamated with certain amount of Al (LM-Al droplet for short) and was placed on a graphite substrate immersed in the alkaline electrolyte (0.5 mol/L NaOH in current study)
The LM amoebas with different numbers of main extensions were observed, which display large resemblance to the pseudopodia
Summary
The fundamental mechanism underlying these unconventional behaviors has been revealed to be the surface tension variations induced by the cooperative effects of the electrochemical reduction by Al reaction and the electrochemical oxidation via graphite This finding, which closely resembles the amoeba biology in nature, would promote peoples’ basic understanding of the soft characteristics of liquid gallium alloy machine fueled by Al. the multifunctional behaviors of such hybrid material system offer new insights for the design of future soft devices even bionic robots which would own large and diverse shape transformation capability
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