For many years, researchers have been trying to create a durable, low-cost synthetic muscle, but it has never been successful. Samples manufactured to date are either too expensive to be mass-produced (such as carbon nanotubes); either too fragile and too energy intensive (say you, shape memory alloy), so that there is not much practical value. But recently, a research team at MIT used nylon fiber to create an ideal artificial muscle that meets all practical requirements.

According to a report published yesterday by the academic journal Advanced Materials ("Advanced Materials"), the secret of this technology lies in the shape and heating of the fibers. Nylon fibers have a very magical character, and when you heat them, they shrink in length and increase in diameter. This makes nylon fiber an ideal material for linear motion, such as lifting something upright. But it is not that simple to bend nylon fibers while shrinking.

In the conventional method, the pulley device is required to bend the nylon. This adds to the weight, complexity and cost of the system – they are exactly the three things that need to be reduced in mass production of new technologies.

The MIT team found a clever way to get around this problem. The team used ordinary nylon yarn. They first compress it and change the circular cross section to a rectangle. Then they only heat one side of the fiber. In this way, the heated side shrinks faster than the unheated side, forcing the nylon fibers to bend toward the heated side. The heating source can be anything, including resistance heating, chemical reaction heating, and laser heating. These nylon fibers are surprisingly durable and can withstand 100,000 cycles of use and can shrink 17 times in one second.

Below is a picture of three MIT researchers performing a heating and bending test on the fiber. In the third image, the researchers used laser irradiation to heat the fiber side.

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