Artificial Muscles Pack a Mean Punch 139
sciencehabit writes "Here's a twist: Scientists have designed a flexible, yarn-like artificial muscle that can also pack a punch. It can contract in 25 milliseconds—a fraction of the time it takes to blink an eye—and can generate power 85 times as great as a similarly sized human muscle. The new muscles are made of carbon nanotubes filled with paraffin wax that can twist or stretch in response to heat or electricity. When the temperature rises, the wax melts and forces the nanotubes to contract. Such artificial muscles, the researchers say, could power smart materials, sensors, robots, and even devices inside the human body."
mechwarrior (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the efficiency like?
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Re:mechwarrior (Score:5, Funny)
You've got a great point there. While the numbers are impressive (85 times more powerful?), the heating and cooling systems would have to be pretty efficient for it to be useful. The article also doesn't say how long it takes the fibers to recharge between twitches. Still, I think it's exciting, but that might just be because I'm writing a mechwarrior story with artificial muscles :)
You have artificial muscles? Does Lance know about this?
fiber recharge time less than 50 milliseconds (Score:5, Interesting)
"delivers 3% tensile contraction at 1200 cycles/minute"
The abstract explicitly states that they tested the carbon-nanotube fibers for up to 1-million cycles with a rep-rate of 1200 cycles/minute, so that gives us 20 Hz, so the recharge/rep time is less than 1/20th of a second = 50 milliseconds:
The article's abstract (Electrically, Chemically, and Photonically Powered Torsional and Tensile Actuation of Hybrid Carbon Nanotube Yarn Muscles) [sciencemag.org] has this to say about how many times this Nanotube yarn muscle can be used:
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We have designed guest-filled, twist-spun carbon nanotube yarns as electrolyte-free muscles that provide fast, high-force, large-stroke torsional and tensile actuation. More than a million torsional and tensile actuation cycles are demonstrated, wherein a muscle spins a rotor at an average 11,500 revolutions/minute or delivers 3% tensile contraction at 1200 cycles/minute. [bold text added by me to accentuate the answer, at least one million cycles demonstrated thus far]
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How many cycles does the fiber last for? Human muscle regenerates itself, so it can cycle sorta indefinitely, right?
Normal human muscles do that. This research could be very interesting for those that suffer from Muscular Dystrophy.
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Behind the paywall, 3% actuation requires temperature to rise from 25C to >200C. They seem to get their best work production (120 mJ/kg for input power of 6W/cm) somewhere around 1500 C. 1-5-0-0. Right around the melting point of most steels.
Not saying that's a deal breaker, but temperatures like that offer significant challenges to use as a prosthetic muscle. Probably more useful as a linear actuator in micro/nanofabrication than as 'artificial muscle.' The reason they're able to get 20 Hz operatio
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The UN will fold when a Jenner rolls up.
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I'm pretty sure even an UrbanMech [sarna.net] would do the job.
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And you're going to waste huge amounts of power to work the muscles, so it can run and punch?
Sorry, I think my Ogre/Bolo http ( colon) //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(tank) beats your mecha. And crunches the pieces.
mark
Starship Troopers here we come. (Score:2)
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Re:Starship Troopers here we come. (Score:5, Insightful)
In the movie-of-the-same-name-that-was-nothing-like-the-book, that would have been an expensive special effect, so they just had cheap plastic armour.
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movie-of-the-same-name-that-was-nothing-like-the-book
Reuse of character names - Check
At least one enemy included from book - Check
Thats all I got, but it is at least something from the book:-P
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The problem this democracy faces currently is a total fucking lack of Twinkies!
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They did at least get the idea of an oppressive media-driven corporatocracy right. But we're talking about 3 minutes, total, of the entire pile of offal. Given the movie's length, that gives is about a 2% success rate.
If the remake is even close to 25% accurate, it'll be seen as an icon of the genre. It's one of the few times that you actually want a remake of a movie. Plastic and foam kind of don't make for a believable experience. Nor does a casting job from hell. Or effects that Lucas did better 20
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I can't tell if they just developed normal myomer technology, or MASC...
Fembot warrior (Score:2)
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You mad, bro?
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Re:mechwarrior (Score:4, Informative)
Ah, triple strength myomer then.
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It's not just waste heat, ambient heat (like on a sunny day) could also pose problems.
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Paraffin wax filled bucky-muscle armored suit + integrated flamethrower = bow before the Fire Lord! You pathetic human vermin!
MUAAAHAHAHAHAHAHHAH!!
"Some men just want to watch the world burn" - Alfred
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The Flamer is pretty much a God weapon against these.
Roll my Jenner up with a flamer and some Streak SRMs.
Flame your ass and watch as your 85 ton mech immediately assumes the fetal position as all you "Muscles" contract.
Then I just throw a few SSRMs at you and then kick you in the cockpit.
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Fuck heat. Run a Gauss Cat.
Article brings random wonder... (Score:3)
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Astartes Power Armour!
Re:Article brings random wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if such a technology could be used in artificially enhancing the muscles of a person to make a super-human, or super-soldier. The chemistry can't be that complex, so I'm sure it's possible through bio-chemical engineering. I'd bet $100 that the US and others have done it before.
I'm thinking they'd have to reinforce the bones and joints as well. 85x stronger muscles are going to do some serious damage if the bones aren't reinforced.
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I hear the Borg are looking into this.
Re:Article brings random wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to rip your tendons in half, sure.
You'd have to completely replace the skeletal muscular system and integrate it with existing parts so it can handle the new tissue. And then there are the issues of skin abrasion, circulatory problems, self-healing...
Needless to say we won't be seeing superhumans anytime soon, at least not of this sort. You may see some kind of application in robotics or assisted lifting devices. Maybe in fifteen, twenty years if the technology proves feasible and robust enough you may see a powered armor.
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(They laminated the skeleton or something, or at least the long bones.)
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Zahn's Cobra trilogy comes to mind. (They laminated the skeleton or something, or at least the long bones.)
The whole bloody skeleton. Downside was, the Cobras started developing arthritis, anemia, & a couple other things that I can't recall off the top of my head, so the enhanced skeleton was a mixed blessing. Add to that the hardwired reflexes in the embedded nanocomputer, and things really went crazy.
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Or they could only use 1/85 of that to save space/cost or have spares (like FLASH drives) to kick in when the performance degrades over time.
One doesn't eat the whole bowl of food like some untrained pet.
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I wonder if you could layer some sort of metal on to a human skeleton....
85x stronger? facial expressions, robo fish... (Score:2)
jamstar7 wrote: "85x stronger muscles are going to do some serious damage if the bones aren't reinforced."
From TFA, suggested initial applications include "precise facial expression in robots" and "movement in small toys like robotic fish":
"Compared to their size and weight, the performance of these muscles is spectacular," Baughman says. "And we can do all sorts of things with them: We can weave them; we can braid them; we can knit them; we can cut them in different lengths."
Baughman suggests that the muscles could be useful for providing power for microfluidics chips, generating precise facial expressions in robots, and providing movement in small toys such as robotic fish in an aquarium. For many other applications—such as those inside the human body and "smart fabrics" that could become more porous when the temperature heats up or contract around an open wound—the muscles will need to be improved and scaled up in size.
It is an interesting approach, but we're a ways off from powered armor or super-strong robots.
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Synthetic enzymes are just around the corner, if the previous week's submission is to be believed.
So, enzymatically generating long double-wall carbon nanotube fibers inside bone matrix seems plausible. (use glucose as the source molecule, shear off oxygen and hydrogen as water, and bind the carbon in place. would probably require a whole new cell morphology though.)
Similar approaches could use existing muscle fiber bundles, and just cause them to grow coiled like that. The magic here, is that because it is
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That's why you need sintered nanograin titania (titanium oxide.) A transparent ceramic, stronger than steel, lighter than aluminum,as flexible as plastic and able to sustain temperatures that would turn most metals into fondu. (A nearly perfect material for building engine blocks :-) Because its formed from powder (or in theory could be 3D printed from a paste) you can make it into any shape including the complex reinforcing structures found in bones (and adding additional lightness.) being transparent, you
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I wonder if such a technology could be used in artificially enhancing the muscles of a person to make a super-human, or super-soldier. The chemistry can't be that complex, so I'm sure it's possible through bio-chemical engineering. I'd bet $100 that the US and others have done it before.
Yes, they did it once, but a Nazi spy killed the doctor, who was the only person who knew how to create the Super-Soldier Serum. The Doctor, who's name has changed twice, didn't apparently trust the "cloud" and wanted job security by refusing to write down every crucial element of the treatment, leaving behind a flawed, imperfect knowledge of the needed steps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_America#1940s [wikipedia.org]
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I bet it absolutely could be used to make a super-soldier, wearing some kind of high-tech exoskeleton. And, as you say, maybe already have, why would they tell anyone. This and the invisibility thing being reported on in the say day. Crysis much?
I love carbon nanotubes, we need a way to make lots of them cheaper.
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I'd bet $100 that the US and others have done it before.
How about $6,000,000? "Steve Austin, a man barely alive..."
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Six million dollar man ... (Score:3)
Could be interesting. But what's the energy conversion efficiency like?
Robots don't regenerate (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: how many times a muscle can be used ... (Score:5, Informative)
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We have designed guest-filled, twist-spun carbon nanotube yarns as electrolyte-free muscles that provide fast, high-force, large-stroke torsional and tensile actuation. More than a million torsional and tensile actuation cycles are demonstrated, wherein a muscle spins a rotor at an average 11,500 revolutions/minute or delivers 3% tensile contraction at 1200 cycles/minute.
[bold text added by me to accentuate the answer, at least one million cycles demonstrated thus far]
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60 beats/min * 60 min/hr * 24 hr/day * 365.25 days/year * 77 years
= 2429935200
= 2.43 * 10^9 = 2.43 billion heartbeats per average lifetime.
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So if you're 31 years old, your heart have beaten 10^9 times thus far. Then each muscle you use at a lower rate than the heart would tell you that you need fewer than 2.43
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Most things would break in a relatively short timeframe if operated at their maximum rate. A human heart would expend it's average lifetime beat count in a little more than 3 years if it operated at 1200 bpm and only 22 years at 200bpm(target max rate for a human heart).
Consider an RF electro-mechanical switch. They tend to be pretty robust (as far as mechanical items go), but you won't see many manufacturers list a life of greater than 1,000,000 cycles. Thats on a very simple, highly mature design. So a
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1200 cycles per minute isn't the maximum. It's the frequency needed to exert 3% tension.
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Actually the wax is a safety feature. When the robots revolt, we can easily melt down the uprising with hair driers and carefully placed space heaters...
All part of my Plan (Score:5, Funny)
Ah. Excellent, I have been intentionally not developing real muscles for years so I would have room for the artificial ones.
Who's sorry now dad?!
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You will be when you use that artificial muscle to do what you do on that computer. Your grandmother still won't go near a computer after she came over to check on you that one day school got out early.
Impact stresses (Score:1)
What I'm curious about is what kind of stress this would introduce to a human body if it it were used for artificial limbs. 85 times the strength would also mean a similar increase in energy conversion. Sure, It would be super sweet to see someone do the long jump without a pole, But at the same time the laws of physics haven't changed. The impact will still be distributed through out the skeletal structure of your body. Unless there is some type of hydraulic impact system. Then, Well, I admit defeat on th
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Perhaps a more modest version of say 2x human strength could be used to give more practical enhancements.
We'll call it "Halcoid Four-One" (Score:2)
The article (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/338/6109/928.full
I suppose that this will answer some of the questions.
Kind of makes me wonder why slashdot almost never links the REAL articles and instead just links some fancy news sites with second hand information.
paywalled. (Score:3)
Kind of makes me wonder why slashdot almost never links the REAL articles and instead just links some fancy news sites with second hand information.
Maybe because of the paywall?
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.
Using the science magazine link without the ".full" suffix will at least get you the abstract and a little bit of interesting text, instead of a direct link to the pay-wall and a request for money to continue. Anyway, here's the abstract if you don't want to bother clicking:
;>)
Electrically, Chemically, and Photonically Powered Torsional and Tensile Actuation of Hybrid Carbon Nanotube Yarn Muscles
Artificial muscles are of practical interest, but few typ
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Kind of makes me wonder why slashdot almost never links the REAL articles and instead just links some fancy news sites with second hand information.
We have a contender for "Woosh of the month"!
Yam-like? (Score:4, Funny)
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Yes, you have bad kerning.
Install Ubuntu.
--
BMO
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obligatory: http://xkcd.com/1015/ [xkcd.com]
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What a great opportunity! (Score:2)
These would make for a kick-ass revival of the old Rock'em Sock'em Robots toy!
Someone's gotta say it... (Score:2)
FALCON PUNCH!!!
basically the same thing (Score:2)
*this statement has not been approved by the FDA
Motors? (Score:3)
Really? (Score:2, Interesting)
Contract in 25 mS - what does that mean? The time before contraction is initiated? Or is it related to shortening velocity? If so, over what distance and how liner is the contractile force? Then there's recovery time before the next contraction; the force generated per unit cross sectional area of this material (what do they exactly mean by "size"); efficiency and heat dissipation. As with all these hyped technology claims that purport to mimic biological systems there's an embarrassing lack of detail. And
Heat-driven? Not good. (Score:3)
This seems to have the same problem as shape-memory alloys. Those change shape quickly when heated above their transition temperature, but the amount of energy you have to put in is far more than you get out. Then they have to cool down before they can be cycled again. Power to weight ratio is good, but energy to weight ratio is poor because the cycle time is slow.
Probably not all that useful as a general actuator.
contraction ratio? (Score:2)
Also important and that no one has mentioned yet is the contraction ratio. The muscle does no good if it can only contract 1% of it's length...
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Not just that, but how controllable is the contraction, can it contract half way? Or is it just on/off?
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". The muscle does no good if it can only contract 1% of it's length...
Sure it does, a lot of use. Just not replacement for your arms.
In a completely unrelated way (Score:2)
Scientists in a lab...great... (Score:2)
Now figure out a way to mass produce it and slap it on a robot.
Or make a new artificial heart.
I appreciate that this is a first step. But sometimes I get tired of the "scientists in a lab figured out a way to make a few molecules/micrograms/reallyreallytinyinsignificantamounts of X after 1000 hours of labor". I'm much more interested in the practicality of things, and until you can efficiently mass produce in usable quatities i almost (not quite though) dont care. yes i am impatient.
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"Or make..."
Why not "and make..."?
Anyways, if you don't like hearing about the cutting edge development, why do you read article about that topic?
Just read a Wal-mart ad, that way you only hear about things that ahve been developed.
Soon (Score:2)
I canget rid of these flash limbs and get 'bionic' arms, and legs.
Just don't attach them to bone... (Score:2)
...or you'll be able to break those bones into itty-bitty pieces. Even as it is, bone and cartilage often have to withstand muscular forces that are ten to thirty times greater than the limb itself is actually exerting due to mechanical disadvantage at the torque pivots.
Multiply that by 25 and you'll very likely exert fracture-level stresses on the bone or severely damage the cartilage. So if you plan to "go bionic" either use scaled down versions of these "muscles" or go bionic all the way with adamantiu
but expand again? (Score:2)
am I too late for Mechwarrior references? (Score:1)
ARGH!
Seriously, a few things to consider are
1) replacing natural muscle with this artificial muscle means that your energy requirements are drastically reduced: the ATP requirements would probably be limited to the nerve impulses required for muscle contraction and some other collateral factors.
2) you would need to have some sort of aesthetic implants: the amount of artificial muscle required to replace is going to be smaller: "[artificial muscle] can generate power 85 times as great as a similarly sized hu
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