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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SmartCore (Smart Core/shell nanorod arrays for artificial skin)

Teaser

Summary

The skin of humans and animals constitutes a specialized, complex system where body-external world interactions take place and interplay. Stimuli are captured by the skin and transformed into real world information content. Despite advances in our understanding of mechano- and thermosensation, replication of these unique sensory characteristics in artificial skin remains challenging. The goal of this project is to integrate temperature, humidity and pressure sensing in a single novel artificial skin and achieve sensing with spatial resolution down to 1mm and lower.
Such skin, applied to advanced robot could revolutionize the interaction between humans and machines, making the latter smarter, more responsive, safer and more human friendly.

Work performed

So far the materials responsive to temperature, humidity and pressure have been developed. In details, we have studied in which ranges of temperature, humidity and pressure our materials are sensitive, with which sensitivity amplitude and how fast they sense changes in these three stimuli. We have also developed an automated way to integrate the two materials together.

Final results

We demonstrated that hydrogel thin films synthesized by initiated chemical vapor deposition show fast and strong response to temperature in water vapor environment up to 200% of their thickness. In addition the thickness change depends on the rate at which the temperature is changing. In addition, this same class of materials can be used for drug delivery. This could be also important for artificial skins. The drug release kinetics can be also tuned by several orders of magnitude depending on the chemistry of the material. Finally we also demonstrated that we can deposit ZnO by plasma enhanced atomic layer deposition at room temperature. The ability to grow inorganic thin films with highly controllable structural and optical properties at low substrate temperature enables the manufacturing of functional devices on thermo-sensitive substrates without the need of material postprocessing.
Considering all this, we expect to achieve an artificial skin comprised of ZnO and the hydrogel, whereby the latter is responsive to temperature, humidity and can deliver drugs.