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IPFS News Link • Science, Medicine and Technology

Scientists create Terminator-style muscle at 1,000 times human strength

• http://rt.com
 The invention gives vanadium dioxide amazing, superhero-style powers. Its most striking property is to change shape and structure whenever differing amounts of heat are applied to it.

This made it perfectly suited for creating a torsional motor muscle, as researchers at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have found, the Lab’s website reported.

Added to this is the material’s capacity for changing size and other physical characteristics. And when made into a robotic muscle, its estimated strength equals to hurling objects 50 times its weight and five times its length at speeds as fast as 60 milliseconds.

Team leader on the study, Junqiao Wu, said in Berkeley Lab’s statement that they have “created a micro-bimorph dual coil that functions as a powerful torsional muscle, driven thermally or electro-thermally by the phase transition of vanadium dioxide.”

Wu, who is a member of both Berkeley Lab and the Berkeley University’s Materials Science and Engineering department, co-authored the research submitted to the journal Advanced Materials, entitled “Powerful, Multifunctional Torsional Micro Muscles Activated by Phase Transition.”
 
 

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