Scientists engineer carbon nanotubes into artificial muscles

An international team of scientists has developed new artificial muscles made from nanotech yarns and infused with paraffin wax. The artificial muscles can lift more than 100,000 times their own weight and generate 85 times more mechanical power than natural muscle of the same size.

The strength of the artificial muscles comes from twisting and coiling of the carbon nanotubes, which compresses a large amount of energy into a small volume. The paraffin coating, when heated electrically or using a flash of light, causes the nanotube yarn to increase in volume, causing more coiling and shortening the strand.

“Because of their simplicity and high performance, these yarn muscles could be used for such diverse applications as robots, catheters for minimally invasive surgery, micromotors, mixers for microfluidic circuits, tunable optical systems, microvalves, positioners and even toys,” said Dr. Ray Baughman, team leader, Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry and director of the Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute at UT Dallas.

The technology was developed by scientists from UT Dallas, the University of Wollongong in Australia, Hanyang University in South Korea, Nankai University in China, University of British Columbia in Canada, and the State University of Campinas and Sao Paulo State University, both in Brazil.