Summary Liquid metal (LM) with high electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, excellent biocompatibility, and extraordinary fluidity has emerged as a promising class of functional materials. However, such materials still encounter many practical challenges due to the rather limited forms available so far. As a promising remedy, LM composites in synergy with other materials would open tremendous opportunities for fundamental research or practical applications. This is because controllable integration of base LM with functional materials (e.g., metal nanoparticles, polymers, and drug molecules) would significantly tune the intrinsic properties of LM as desired, enabling it to offer further major potential in tackling various sectors' challenging issues, including thermal management, biomedicine, chemical catalysis, flexible electronics, and soft robots. Here, we systematically summarize and review the fundamental progress in pursuing LM composites. The basic composite strategies are outlined in three categories: LM composites with core-shell structure, LM-polymer composites, and LM-particle composites. The effectiveness of the composite strategy is illustrated via the typical applications of LM composites in representative fields. The challenges and perspectives in developing LM composites are also identified and interpreted to better guide future research. It is expected that the coming LM era will witness a new world of fruitful composites thereby discovered or invented.

Liquid Metal Composites

Cellular structures consist of foams, honeycombs, and lattices. Lattices have many outstanding properties over foams and honeycombs, such as lightweight, high strength, absorbing energy, and reducing vibration, which has been extensively studied and concerned. Because of excellent properties, lattice structures have been widely used in aviation, bio-engineering, automation, and other industrial fields. In particular, the application of additive manufacturing (AM) technology used for fabricating lattice structures has pushed the development of designing lattice structures to a new stage and made a breakthrough progress. By searching a large number of research literature, the primary work of this paper reviews the lattice structures. First, based on the introductions about lattices of literature, the definition and classification of lattice structures are concluded. Lattice structures are divided into two general categories in this paper: uniform and non-uniform. Second, the performance and application of lattice structures are introduced in detail. In addition, the fabricating methods of lattice structures, i.e., traditional processing and additive manufacturing, are evaluated. Third, for uniform lattice structures, the main concern during design is to develop highly functional unit cells, which in this paper is summarized as three different methods, i.e., geometric unit cell based, mathematical algorithm generated, and topology optimization. Forth, non-uniform lattice structures are reviewed from two aspects of gradient and topology optimization. These methods include Voronoi-tessellation, size gradient method (SGM), size matching and scaling (SMS), and homogenization, optimization, and construction (HOC). Finally, the future development of lattice structures is prospected from different aspects.

Design and Optimization of Lattice Structures: A Review

Lattice structures, which are also known as architected cellular structures, have been applied in various industrial sectors, owing to their fascinated performances, such as low elastic modulus, high stiffness-to-weight ratio, low thermal expansion coefficient, and large specific surface area. The lattice structures fabricated by conventional manufacturing technologies always involve complicated process control, additional assembly steps, or other uncontrollable factors. Furthermore, limited types of unit cells can be used to construct lattice structures when using conventional processes. Fortunately, additive manufacturing technology, based on a layer-by-layer process from computer-aided design models, demonstrates the unique capability and flexibility and provides an ideal platform in manufacturing complex components like lattice structures, resulting in an effective reduction in the processing time to actual application and minimum of material waste. Therefore, additive manufacturing relieves the constraint of structure design and provides accurate fabrication for lattice structures with good quality. This work systematically presents an overview of conventional manufacturing methods and novel additive manufacturing technologies for metallic lattice structures. Afterward, the design, optimization, a variety of properties, and applications of metallic lattice structures produced by additive manufacturing are elaborated. By summarizing state-of-the-art progress of the additively manufactured metallic lattice structures, limitations and future perspectives are also discussed.

Additive manufacturing of metallic lattice structures: Unconstrained design, accurate fabrication, fascinated performances, and challenges

State-of-the-art of selective laser melting process: A comprehensive review

Review on characterization and impacts of the lattice structure in additive manufacturing

Soft robotic grippers (SRGs) have been extensively employed in robotic grasping and manipulation applications due to the fact that they are beneficial for pick-and-place of difficult-to-handle and ...

Bio-Inspired Shape-Adaptive Soft Robotic Grippers Augmented with Electroadhesion Functionality.

Previous studies have revealed the influence of various lattice structures on the material density and mechanical properties. However, the majority of the topologies that are considered as study objects directly refer to metal/non-crystal lattice cell configurations. Therefore, this paper proposes a configuration generation approach for generating a lattice structure, which can obtain a lattice configuration that enjoys the advantages of both ultra-low weight and favorable mechanical properties. Based on this approach, a new type of face-centered cubic lattice (all face-centered cubic, AFCC) structure with comprehensively optimal properties in terms of mass and mechanical properties is obtained. The experimental samples are formed with Ti6Al4V by the selective laser melting (SLM) method. Quasi-static uniaxial compression performance experiments and finite element analysis (FEA) are conducted on an AFCC structure and the control group body-centered cubic (BCC) structure. The results demonstrates that our optimized AFCC lattice structure is superior to the BCC structure, with elastic modulus and yield limit increases of 143% and 120%, respectively. For the same degree of deformation, the energy absorbed increases approximately 2.4 times. The AFCC demonstrates significant advantages in terms of its mechanical properties and anti-explosion impact resistance while maintaining favorable ultra-low weight, which validates the hypothesis that the proposed configuration generation approach can provide guidance for the design and further research on ultra-light lattice structures in related fields.

https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1944/11/10/1856/pdf

Configuration Optimization Design of Ti6Al4V Lattice Structure Formed by SLM

For electrostatic adhesion on a dielectric material, the electrostatic adhesion force gradually increases to a steady value after the voltage exerted onto the interdigital electrodes However, little has been addressed to reveal governing mechanisms behind this dynamic phenomenon In this paper, a theoretical model is presented for analysis of the dynamic properties of electrostatic adhesion on dielectric materials Firstly, the electric field was derived by solving the Laplace equation of the electrical potential for each sub-area using general solution and boundary conditions Then, the electrostatic adhesion force was obtained using the Maxwell stress tensor formulation Finally, the dynamic properties of the electric field and electrostatic adhesion force were assessed by evaluating the transient response of the field and force under a step in applied voltages Experimental studies for verification were conducted by evaluating the adhesion performance of an electrode panel on three different s

An analytical model for electrostatic adhesive dynamics on dielectric substrates

The design, analysis and fabrication of an underwater vibration suction module is presented. Inspired by the suction principle of the octopus suckers, the module proposed in this paper uses vibration of the suction cups to mimic the muscle contraction and expansion of the octopus suckers, which can produce negative pressure between the suction cup and the adsorption surface. The pressure change inside of the suction cup in the process of vibrating was analyzed and a mathematical model for a single suction cup was established. An experiment platform was designed with enough experimental work to verify the theoretical analysis. A prototype of underwater vibration suction was manufactured and tested, which shows a relative good suction capacity in different environments. Underwater vibration suction is a kind of new suction technology, which can be used on some underwater devices, such as underwater wall-climbing robots.

Design and experimental research of an underwater vibration suction module inspired by octopus suckers

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-665X/aba848/pdf

Variable stiffness soft pneumatic grippers augmented with active vacuum adhesion

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Rui Chen

Author Tools

Chat about Author