Self-driven gel conveyer: Autonomous transportation by peristaltic motion of self-oscillating gel

Chemo-responsive, self-oscillating gels that undergo biomimetic communication

“…78,79 Given the robust exchange of chemical and mechanical energy in these systems, one might anticipate that the BZ gels should also be capable of mechanochemical transduction, converting mechanical energy into chemical energy. In other words, an external mechanical action could affect the internal chemical activity within the gels.…”

“…These attributes could be usefully exploited in a range of microfluidic applications, where, for example, an external light source could be utilized to tailor the movement of a soft ''conveyor belt'' 78,79,93 and thus, regulate the transport of microscopic objects within the devices.…”

Self-oscillating gel as novel biomimetic materials

“…Further, we attempted to transport an object by utilizing the peristaltic motion of the selfoscillating gel (Murase et al, 2009a(Murase et al, , 2009b(Murase et al, , 2010. In order to control the transportability, it is necessary to enhance the driving force as a conveyer.…”

“…The mass transportability does not depend on the velocity of the chemical wave but on the diameter of the cylindrical PAAm gel and the inclination angle of the wave front. We have proposed a model to describe the mass transport phenomena based on the Hertz contact theory, and the relation between the transportability and the peristaltic motion was investigated for the cases that the loaded gel cargos were gel bead and cylindrical gel (Murase et al, 2010). It was found that the surface design to form grooves was efficient to increase contact areas when the wave front of the peristaltic motion reaches the loaded cargo and useful to transport not only cylindrical cargos but also spherical cargos in desired directions.…”

“…were realized. As an autonomic microconveyor, mass transport surface by utilizing peristaltic motion of the self-oscillating gel was also designed (Murase et al, 2009(Murase et al, , 2010. In the case of the uncrosslinked linear polymer, the polymer undergoes spontaneous cyclic soluble-insoluble changes and the transmittance of the polymer solution oscillates autonomously (Yoshida et al, 2002a).…”