Wednesday, 8 June 2022 at Noon | 521 Cory Hall
Jakub Kedzierski
Advanced Materials and Microsystems Group | Lincoln Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Host: Professor Kris Pister
Surface tension is well known to be a dominant force in small systems. Care must be taken for surface tension forces not to rip MEMs structures apart during fabrication. But what happens if we harness surface tension instead of battling against it? In this seminar, I will introduce microhydraulics, a way to harness surface tension effects to build powerful actuators and motors with torque densities two orders of magnitude higher than traditional inductive motors. Microhydraulic structures consist of thin (few microns) layers of solid material with imbedded electrodes, separated by an array of conductive fluidic droplets. Layers can push and pull on each other by electrostatic forces between the electrodes and the droplets. Because the microhydraulic force is generated between a fluid and a solid electrode, through a hard dielectric, structures are largely immune to friction wear, soft dielectric breakdown, and pull-in instability. Voltage of operation is also modest, at between 25 and 75 volts. In contrast to classical motors, microhydraulic structures improve as internal dimensions are scaled down. For example, reducing the layer thickness, and droplet array pitch by a factor of two, increases force density and power by a factor of 4. The demonstrated microhydraulic motors already have a torque density 20 times higher than a Tesla drive motor, at only 6 mm diameter. By scaling droplet pitch from 40 to 15 microns, torque density can be improved by roughly another order of magnitude.
Small, high torque actuators are ideal for use in robotics and microsurgery. Microhydraulic drive can be directly integrated with a robotic hinge, without the use of ubiquitous strain-wave gears, which limit robot efficiency, back-drivability, and reaction time. For example, relevant to reaction time, the 6 mm diameter microhydraulic motor has a boggling angular acceleration of 80 million degrees per second squared. Looking out into future applications, microhydraulic technology could be employed in building programmable materials, materials that can change shape, properties, or perform a physical task when given digital instructions.
BIO INFO
Jakub Kedzierski received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 2001, where he co-invented the FinFET transistor, a device architecture currently in use by Intel and TSMC for deeply scaled technology nodes. Following his graduation, he worked at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center on advanced silicon devices, and in 2005 moved to MIT Lincoln Laboratory. At MIT, Jakub has led the work on low power electronics, graphene transistors, and microfluidics. He designed an ultra-low power CMOS technology, built one of the world’s first top-gated graphene transistors, and helped to initiate and grow the microfluidic research program in the Advanced Technology Division. He served as the assistant group leader in the Advanced Silicon Technology group, and as a visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, in Mumbai. Currently, he is a senior staff in the Advanced Materials and Microsystems group at Lincoln Laboratory, working on microsystem actuation and power. Jakub has received both the IEEE EDS Paul Rappaport and IEEE George Smith Awards for best paper in 2001 and 2009 respectively, and the best paper award from MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 2016. In the last few years, Jakub has pioneered the microhydraulic actuator technology, with multiple publications in Nature Microsystems and Nanoengineering, as well as on the cover of Science Robotics.
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