A new material that is weight for weight, stronger than steel and stiffer than diamond, and weighs little more than its volume in air, could be the perfect artificial muscle for robots. This truly 21st century muscle could be used to make artificial limbs, "smart" skins, shape-changing structures, ultra-strong robots and - in the immediate future - highly-efficient solar cells.

"We've made a totally new type of artificial muscle that is able to provide performance characteristics that have not previously been obtained," said Ray Baughman, a materials scientist at the University of Texas, Dallas, and co-developer of the new muscle.

 

Baughman and his colleagues have developed a technique to make ribbons of tangled nanotubes that expand in width by 220% when a voltage is applied and then return to their normal size once it is removed, and the process takes only milliseconds.

 

The material is extremely stiff and strong in the "long" direction – that in which the nanotubes are aligned – but is as stretchy as rubber across its width. It also maintains its properties over an extreme range of temperatures: from -196 degrees C, at which temperature nitrogen is liquid, to 1538 degrees C, above the melting point of iron. This means any robot equipped with the nanotube muscles could potentially keep working in some very extreme environments.

 

Natural muscles, said Baughman, contract at a maximum rate of 10 percent per second. In the same amount of time, his latest nanotube sheaths can contract by 40,000 percent. The new material has some advantages over previous artificial muscles. Some of those work only when bathed in methanol fuel, others are capable of only very small changes in size and none of them work well at extreme temperatures.

 

The first applications, said Baughman, would likely be as wrappers for solar cells, with nanotubes conducting electricity and rapidly changing shape in order to produce optimally light-sensitive arrangements.

 

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