Liquid Metals: Beyond the Terminator
By The Editors
October 28, 2021
From The Staff Chemistry Engineering Physics
It takes deformable metals to create soft and squishy robots or wearable electronic devices that interface directly with people's bodies. So far, engineers can create ultra-stretchable wires, deformable antennas, and microelectrodes by patterning metal (by injecting metal into microchannels or by a kind of 3D printing). Engineers also have developed several other techniques for manipulating the oxide that forms at the surface of gallium-based liquid metals, allowing them to control the shape and position of the metal for reconfigurable devices.
On September 28, 2021, Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society, hosted a virtual presentation by Michael Dickey on the topic of liquid metals as part of its Science by the Slice series (video and curated live tweets are below). Dickey is the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at NC State University. His research interests include soft matter—liquid metals, gels, polymers—for soft and stretchable devices such as electronics, energy harvesters, textiles, and soft robotics.
One key component of Dickey's talk was about how the oxides that form on the surfaces of metals—a thin layer where the metal reacts with oxygen present in the air—are crucial to being able to print liquid-metal structures at room temperature. For applications in which all the characteristics of a metal are needed, however, the oxide layer may get in the way.
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