Engineering Science and Materials Commons^™

Liquid Metal-Elastomer Soft Composites With Independently Controllable And Highly Tunable Droplet Size And Volume Loading, Ravi Tutika, Steven Kmiec, A. B. M. Tahidul Haque, Steve W. Martin, Michael D. Bartlett

Michael Bartlett

Soft composites are critical for soft and flexible materials in energy harvesting, actuators, and multifunctional devices. One emerging approach to create multifunctional composites is through the incorporation of liquid metal (LM) droplets such as eutectic gallium indium (EGaIn) in highly deformable elastomers. The microstructure of such systems is critical to their performance, however, current materials lack control of particle size at diverse volume loadings. Here, we present a fabrication approach to create liquid metal-elastomer composites with independently controllable and highly tunable droplet size (100 nm ≦ D ≦ 80 μm) and volume loading (0 ≦ φ ≦ 80%). This is …