posted on 2021-11-08, 07:44authored byYangyang Peng, Fengxin Sun, Caiqin Xiao, Mohammad Irfan Iqbal, Zhenguo Sun, Mingrui Guo, Weidong Gao, Xiaorui Hu
Fiber-based
artificial muscles with excellent actuation performance
are gaining great attention as soft materials for flexible actuators;
however, current advances in fiber-based artificial muscles generally
suffer from high cost, harsh stimulation regimes, limiting deformations,
chemical toxicity, or complex manufacturing processing, which hinder
the widespread application of those artificial muscles in engineering
and practical usage. Herein, a facile cross-scale processing strategy
is presented to construct commercially available nontoxic viscose
fibers into fast responsive and humidity-driven yarn artificial muscles
with a recorded torsional stroke of 1752° cm–1 and a maximum rotation speed up to 2100 rpm, which are comparable
to certain artificial muscles made from carbon-based composite materials.
The underlying mechanism of such outstanding actuation performance
that begins to form at a mesoscale is discussed by theoretical modeling
and microstructure characterization. The as-prepared yarn artificial
muscles are further scaled up to large-sized fabric muscles through
topological weaving structures by integrating different textile technologies.
These fabric muscles extend the simple motion of yarn muscles into
higher-level diverse deformations without any composite system, complex
synthetic processing, and component design, which enables the development
of new fiber-based artificial muscles for versatile applications,
such as smart textiles and intelligent systems.