Electrorheological (ER) and magnetorheological (MR) suspensions undergo a reverse phase transition from a liquid-like to solid-like state in response to an external electric or magnetic field, respectively. This paper briefly reviews various types of electroor magneto-responsive materials from either polymeric or inorganic and hybrid composite materials. The fabrication strategies for ER/MR can...

The current generation of smart materials has diverse dynamic features that enable them to adapt to the environment and make them the materials of the future. There are four of these aspects of which at least one is incorporated in a functional smart-material based device: smart materials can be sensors or actuators, they can be controlled or they can have biomimetic characteristics. Sensors ar...

Monodisperse anisotropic particles have tremendous potentials in materials science and engineering (Hosein et al., 2010). As one of this kind of materials, snowman-like particles have drawn a special attention in the aspects of both their synthesis mechanism and applications. In this study, we synthesized micron-sized snowman-like poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) particles via a seed emulsion p...

The study of variational problems with nonstandard growth conditions is an interesting topic in recent years. p x -growth problems can be regarded as a kind of nonstandard growth problems and they appear in nonlinear elastic, electrorheological fluids and other physics phenomena. Many results have been obtained on this kind of problems, for example 1–9 . Let Q be Ω × 0, T , where T > 0 is given...

We present the design of a modular tactile sensor and actuator system for observing human demonstrations of contact tasks. The system consists of three interchangeable parts: an intrinsic tactile sensor for measuring net force/ torque, an extrinsic tactile sensor for measuring contact distributions , and a tactile actuator for displaying tactile distributions. The novel components are the extri...