Products of Tomorrow

Self-Cleaning Seals

Motivated by the hazard lunar regolith poses to seals — and thus to achieving a sustained lunar presence — researchers in the Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) have developed seals that actively self-clean in a continuous or periodic manner. This technology applies the concepts of electrodynamic dust shielding (EDS) to develop seals with active self-cleaning capabilities. To clean the seal, a time varying alternating voltage is applied from the power supply, through the high voltage lead and onto the conductive layer of the seal. When this voltage is applied, the resulting electric field produces Coulomb and dielectrophoretic forces that cause the dust to be repelled from the sealing surface. In practice, NASA’s self-cleaning seals could be operated in continuous cleaning mode (actively repelling dust at all times, preventing it from ever contacting the seal surface) or in a periodic cleaning cycle mode (removing dust from the seal surface at regular intervals).

Contact: NASA’s Licensing Concierge
202-358-7432
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Artificial Muscles

MIT engineers have developed a method to grow artificial muscle tissue that twitches and flexes in multiple coordinated directions. As a demonstration, they grew an artificial, muscle-powered structure that pulls both concentrically and radially, much like how the iris in the human eye acts to dilate and constrict the pupil. The researchers fabricated the artificial iris using a new “stamping” approach they developed. First, they 3D printed a small, handheld stamp patterned with microscopic grooves, each as small as a single cell. Then they pressed the stamp into a soft hydrogel and seeded the resulting grooves with real muscle cells. The cells grew along these grooves within the hydrogel, forming fibers. When the researchers stimulated the fibers, the muscle contracted in multiple directions, following the fibers’ orientation. The stamp can be used to grow complex patterns of muscle — and potentially other types of biological tissues, such as neurons and heart cells — that look and act like their natural counterparts.

Contact: Abby Abazorius
617-253-2709
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Swimming Robot

Researchers in the Soft Transducers Lab and the Unsteady flow diagnostics laboratory in EPFL’s School of Engineering, and at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, have developed a compact and versatile robot that can maneuver through tight spaces and transport payloads much heavier than itself. Smaller than a credit card and weighing 6 grams, the nimble swimming robot is ideal for environments with limited space like rice fields, or for performing inspections in waterborne machines. Unlike traditional propeller-based systems, the EPFL robot uses silently undulating fins — inspired by marine flatworms — for propulsion. This design, combined with its light weight, allows the robot to float on the water’s surface and blend seamlessly into natural environments. By oscillating its fins up to 10 times faster than marine flatworms, the robot can reach impressive speeds of 12 centimeters (2.6 body-lengths) per second. In addition to forward swimming and turning, it is capable of controlled backward and sideways swimming.