FoamFactor: Hydrogel-Foam Composite with Tunable Stiffness and Compressibility

TL;DR

FoamFactor is a new hydrogel-foam composite material with adjustable stiffness and compressibility, enabling innovative applications like adaptive footwear, amphibious vehicles, and robotic grippers through hydration-controlled properties.

Contribution

Introduces FoamFactor, a hydrogel-foam composite with a tailored fabrication process and tunable mechanical properties based on hydration state, expanding design possibilities.

Findings

Material transitions from soft and compressible to stiff and incompressible with hydration changes.

Demonstrated applications include multi-functional shoes and amphibious vehicles.

The composite enables new adaptive and responsive mechanical systems.

Abstract

This paper presents FoamFactor, a novel material with tunable stiffness and compressibility between hydration states, and a tailored pipeline to design and fabricate artifacts consisting of it. This technique compounds hydrogel with open-cell foams via additive manufacturing to produce a water-responsive composite material. Enabled by the large volumetric changes of hydrogel dispersions, the material is soft and compressible when dehydrated and becomes stiffer and rather incompressible when hydrated. Leveraging this material property transition, we explore its design space in various aspects pertaining to the transition of hydration states, including multi-functional shoes, amphibious cars, mechanical transmission systems, and self-deploying robotic grippers.