Liquid metal renaissance points to wearables, soft robots, and new materials

摘要

When chemical engineer Michael Dickey talks about his research on liquid metals, he knows what to expect. “People usually say mercury or the Terminator,” he says, alluding to the shape-shifting killer robot from the 1992 movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day . Even many researchers, he says, aren’t familiar with the unique properties and potential uses of these unusual materials, which conduct heat and electricity like any other metal yet are liquids near room temperature. A growing number of research groups are working with liquid metals, hoping to exploit their potential to create new materials, new catalysts, and possibly new ways to trap carbon dioxide. Republished with permission of Royal Society of Chemistry, from ref. 14; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. That unfamiliarity is changing. Over the last few years, he says, liquid metals have undergone a renaissance among researchers—thanks, in part, to growing interest in wearable devices and soft robotics. These technologies demand new kinds of electronics that bend and stretch. Liquid metals also hold enormous potential as routes to new materials and catalysts, which can kick-start useful chemical reactions for many industries and applications. The metals could even help trap and convert carbon dioxide, offering another technology to combat climate change. Less than a decade ago, only a handful of groups around the world were working with liquid metals, notes Kourosh Kalantar-Zadeh, a chemical engineer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. “Now it’s exploding.” Mechanical engineer Carmel Majidi, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, says development of technology based on liquid metals has been held back by concerns about leaks and unreliability. But a push toward safer robots without heavy metal parts, and toward devices worn on clothing, skin, or even inside the body, make the flowing properties of a liquid …