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Harnessing the power of chemically active sheets in solution

Nature Reviews Physics volume 4, pages 125–137 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

In living organisms, diffusing chemicals react with soft tissue to actuate a range of mechanical actions, such as periodic pulsations or net motion. Inspired by this biological behaviour, researchers have created chemically active ‘microswimmers’ that translate chemical input into mechanical work. Because typical microswimmers are hard spheres (that is, zero-dimensional objects) and rigid or flexible rods (1D objects), their movements are constrained relative to higher dimensional, soft matter. In recent years, these limitations have motivated research on 2D active sheets that undergo shape changes or directed motion in response to chemical cues in solution; the combination of dimensionality, chemical activity and structural flexibility leads to new, rich dynamic behaviour. In one class of materials, chemical reactions generate internal stresses in the 2D sheets that trigger the shape transformations; in the second class, the release of energy from chemical reactions drives a fluid flow, which not only transports but also morphs the shape of the sheet. Consequently, these reconfigurable, self-propelled sheets can perform self-sustained operations that were unattainable with previously studied active particles, including self-morphing and self-oscillating behaviour. The latter functionalities can lead to the creation of portable, chemical machines and the discovery of new modes of dynamic self-assembly.

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Fig. 1: Chemically active sheets in solution.
Fig. 2: Chemically active sheets morph into 3D shapes.
Fig. 3: Self-propulsion of chemically active sheets in solution.
Fig. 4: Autonomous rotation of chemically active sheets.
Fig. 5: Self-oscillations of chemically active sheets.
Fig. 6: Self-oscillations of elastic sheets, powered by chemically driven fluid flow.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the Department of Energy under grant DE-FG02-90ER45438, the Department of Defense, Army Research Office under grant W911NF-17-1-0351 and the computational facilities at the Center for Research Computing at the University of Pittsburgh.

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  1. Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Raj Kumar Manna, Abhrajit Laskar, Oleg E. Shklyaev & Anna C. Balazs

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Manna, R.K., Laskar, A., Shklyaev, O.E. et al. Harnessing the power of chemically active sheets in solution. Nat Rev Phys 4, 125–137 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-021-00395-2

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