

A Micro-Muscular Breakthrough - macrebel
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2013/12/19/a-micro-muscular-break-through/

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ChuckMcM
Ok, if this : "energy power density up to approximately 39 kilowatts/kilogram"
holds up, it will change things dramatically. At that power density you can
build walking robots which are humanoid and faster and more powerful with
enough weight budget left over to carry along power packs. Thanks for the
link.

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Someone
That also depends on the efficiency. If this requires twice the power as input
that it produces mechanically, those power packs would become a lot larger.

I skimmed the paper at [http://www.mse.berkeley.edu/~jwu/publications/Liu-
AdvMat-201...](http://www.mse.berkeley.edu/~jwu/publications/Liu-
AdvMat-2013.pdf), but could not find anything about efficiency. that 68
degrees Celsius switching temperature does give me some concerns, though (hm.
Bring it to 37 degrees, and this might become very useful for people with
muscular dystrophy. Or does that show even more that ik don't really know what
I am talking about?)

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clayrichardson
Are you kidding me, I can RENT access to this paper for only 40 hours?

This research is conducted with public funding!

Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the U.S. Department of
Energy. Grant Number: DE-AC02–05CH11231

AFOSR. Grant Number: 9550-13-1-0136

The current research publication situation is completely ridiculous, and I'm
not sure how it can be fixed.

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throwaway198
Would this be the paper? [http://www.mse.berkeley.edu/~jwu/publications/Liu-
AdvMat-201...](http://www.mse.berkeley.edu/~jwu/publications/Liu-
AdvMat-2013.pdf)

I found it on the author's web page, linked in the news article. But I'm not
able to open it.

~~~
clayrichardson
Ah, that is a manuscript draft, but does seem to contain the correct
information.

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macrebel
This breakthrough could be what the car was to the carriage if they can find
scalable ways to advance the manufacturing process. Based on the video, it
does not look like the technical limitations are great. I wonder what this
would look like in the form of a solar or thermal energy transfer method -
i.e. solar to mechanical at astronomical energy efficiency levels.

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personalcompute
I expect there is a lot of MEMS value at the current size, but is there good
reason to believe it will scale?

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jamesaguilar
The main reason to believe that is that nine times out of ten a lab finds
something out and announces it to the world, as has been done here, it ends up
being infeasible to manufacture. There are about a willion "revolutionary new
battery technology" announcements for every one that hits production.

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DannoHung
Would this be useful for developing really strong and accurate micro-
manipulators or am I misunderstanding the claims?

