Biomimetic Liquid Metal Cell

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of liquid metal cells, exploring their construction, sensing abilities, and potential applications in intelligent systems, highlighting their versatile responsiveness and self-adaptive behaviors.

Contribution

It systematically develops a layered cryogenic molding method to create liquid metal cells and demonstrates their use as sensors, valves, and transport carriers.

Findings

Liquid metal cells exhibit multi-field responsiveness

They can be used as sensors and actuators

Demonstrated dynamic control in flow channels

Abstract

Gallium-based liquid metals, as a broad category of emerging functional materials with unique physical, chemical, and biological properties, offer numerous possibilities for advancing intelligent systems. However, a basic query persistently remains for the complex liquid metal system: Is there a minimal functional unit that can fully capture its diversity of morphology and function? Cells, as the most basic structural and functional units of life, are small in scale but have complex structures, functions, and life activities. Analogous to nature, this article proposes the concept of liquid metal cells, and systematically explores their construction routes, sensing capabilities, motion behaviors, and potential applications. We first construct a multi-phase composite structure with liquid metal as the nucleus, ionic solution as the cytoplasm, and polymer as the cell membrane by developing a layered cryogenic molding method. Furthermore, we reveal that liquid metal cells exhibit inherently versatile responsive characteristics and self-adaptive behaviors to thermal, pressure, chemical, electrical, and magnetic fields, indicating "small world, vast potential". Based on these fundamental findings, we finally demonstrate the feasibility of utilizing liquid metal cells as sensors, fluidic valves, and material transport carriers in flow channels through dynamic control.