Untethered, high-speed soft jumpers enabled by combustion for motions through multiphase environments
Haipeng Wang, Yang Yang, Guanzheng Lin, Pengcheng Jiao, Zhiguo He
Abstract
Abstract Soft robots have been widely studied to accomplish multifunctional on-land tasks in recent years. Here, we develop a type of combustion-enabled soft jumpers that are able to move through multiphase media (e.g. water–air multiphase) with a high-speed of ∼6 times body length per second on average and up to ∼9 times body length per second at most while the driving time is less than 0.5 s. The reported soft jumpers are driven by extremely expandable silicon-rubber membranes resulted in the combustion of oxygen-propane mixed gas. Experiments are conducted to investigate the multiphase jumping response of the soft jumpers with respect to the premixed gas ratio <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mi>r</mml:mi> </mml:math> of the combustion. Both numerical and analytical models are developed to investigate the jumping response in terms of the gas amount <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mi>A</mml:mi> </mml:math> , the premixed gas ratio <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mi>r</mml:mi> </mml:math> and the water depth <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mrow> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>D</mml:mi> <mml:mrow> <mml:mtext>W</mml:mtext> </mml:mrow> </mml:msub> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> , and satisfactory agreements are obtained from the comparisons among the experimental, numerical and analytical results.