An Autonomously Reciprocating Transmembrane Nanoactuator

An Integrated Approach to Reciprocating Compressor Design

A typical reciprocating co~pressor consists of a motor, a pump, suction discharge system and a lubrication system. An integrated computer simulation model incorporating all these components simultaneously was developed to predict, evaluate and optimize the overall performance and reliability. For the given design variants of a compressor, the computer program first calculates the mass flow rate...

Autonomous reciprocating migration of an active material.

Periodic to-and-fro migration is a sophisticated mode of locomotion found in many forms of active matter in nature. Providing a general description of periodic migration is challenging, because many details of animal migration remain a mystery. We study periodic migration in a simpler system using a mechanistic model of a photosensitive, active material in which a stimulus-responsive polymer ge...

Using DNA to construct and power a nanoactuator.

A DNA-based molecular machine is described which has two movable arms that are pushed apart when a strand of DNA, the fuel strand, hybridizes with a single-stranded region of the molecular machine. Through the process of branch migration, a second strand of DNA complementary to the fuel strand is able to remove the fuel strand from the molecular machine, restoring it to its original configurati...

A two-state DNA lattice switched by DNA nanoactuator.

A multi-walled carbon nanotube-aluminum bimorph nanoactuator.

A multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWNT) bimorph nanoactuator has been modeled, fabricated and characterized. A thin aluminum film was uniformly deposited on the sidewalls of MWNTs using a pulsed laser deposition method to create the bimorph nanostructure. For a temperature change from 290 to 690 K with measured dimensions of 100 +/- 20 nm for the MWNT diameter, 40 +/- 10 nm for the Al thickness, ...