Materials that bend and conduct electricty

We have so far come across many materials that conducts electricity having fixed dimensions in our day to-day life.These materials are pretty useful in many fields but still there are some fields that requires conductors that are flexible such as in ROBOTICS.Scientists were desperate in finding that kind of material that would be both flexible and conduct electricity and now a pathbreaking discovery has been made by a Japanese team of scientists.They now claim that they have found a rubbery material that bends and stretches and at the same time conduct electricity.No doubt,this could be considered as a sweet surprise in the field of electronics.

The material, described by Tsuyoshi Sekitani of the University of Tokyo in the journal Science, could be used on curved surfaces or even in moving parts, they said.
Sekitani's team developed their material using carbon nanotubes, a long stretch of carbon molecules that can conduct electricity. Actually Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are allotropes of carbon with a nanostructure that can have a length-to-diameter ratio greater than 1,000,000. These cylindrical carbon molecules have novel properties that make them potentially useful in many applications in nanotechnology,electronics,optics and other fields of materials science. They exhibit extraordinary strength and unique electrical properties, and are efficient conductors of heat.

The team mixed these into rubbery polymer to form the basic material. Next, they attached a grid of tiny transistors to the material and then put it to the test.They stretched the sheet of material to nearly double its original size and it snapped back into place, without disrupting the transistors or ruining the material's conductive properties.

The elastic conductor would allow electronic circuits to be mounted in places that would have been impossible up to now, including "arbitrary curved surfaces and movable parts, such as the joints of a robot's arm," Sekitani and colleagues wrote.

Earlier this week, a U.S. team reported developing an elastic mesh material that allowed them to use standard electronics materials to build an electronic eye camera based on the shape and layout of the human eye. John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who wrote about the eye camera in the journal Nature, said the development of materials that can be shaped and molded to curved surfaces will allow for a whole new class of electronics devices that can be used to better interact with the human body, such as brain monitoring devices.

And now with this new discovery we can be sure enough that the field of bio-medical engineering may benefit by making it easier to design new devices with better interaction with our body.

That’s it for now from our team.We will keep you updated on such path breaking discoveries whenever it happens.So keep glued to this blog.