Analysis of a novel micro-hydraulic actuation for MEMS

Pneumatic and hydraulic microactuators: a review

“…Recent publications by the same group have also shown that micropumps based on electro-conjugated fluids can be integrated successfully into bending balloon microactuators [61,62]. Other bending actuators have been realized by combining several inflatable balloons in one elastic structure [58][59][60] or by fabricating asymmetric balloon geometries (see figure 1(5)) [61][62][63]. For instance, Suzumori et al developed an interesting balloon actuator with three chambers [58,59].…”

Liquid–gas surface tension voltage dependence during electrowetting on dielectric testing of water and 5–90 nm gold nanofluids

“…Several methods have been developed for microscale liquid management such as hydraulics [8], electrophoresis [9], electroosmosis [10] and capillary driven phenomena [11] where liquid-gas and solid surface tensions are used to manage the liquid motion. The electrowetting phenomenon for liquid manipulation has raised a wide interest due to its applications in reading technology at micro scale, advanced lithography and complex photonics devices, microfluidic and nanofluidic liquid transportation, thermal management, wave guides, tunable micro lenses, controllable micromirrors, liquid displays, lab-on-chip and bio-MEMS [12][13][14][15][16][17][18].…”

A smart hydraulic joint for future implementation in robotic structures

“…By applying an extension of the single module equations to two modules, and then extrapolating to n-modules via induction (see the Appendix), we can obtain Eqs. (27) and (28) for a flexible hydraulic joint with multiple sections:…”

“…Eqs. (27) and (28) are particularly relevant as they describe the static behaviour of the hydraulic flexible joint for any possible active or passive configuration for a given number of modules. They can be used to predict displacements of modular configurations, or actively control the shape of hydraulic joints embedded on the legged robotic system.…”

“…[2][3][4][5]40 On the other hand, miniaturized hydraulic systems have been developed by several researchers for actuating anthropomorphic hand prostheses, [6][7][8][9][10][11] robotic catheters, [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] self-propelling endoscopes, 18,19 macro-scale hexapod robots, [20][21][22][23] surgical robotic systems, [24][25][26] and several other devices. Different kinds of micro-actuation systems have been investigated 27,28 and several micro-pump systems have been manufactured and their performances compared. 29,30 In this paper, a prototype of the flexible hydraulic flexible joint 40 is investigated and a model is derived.…”