Since the Spring quarter of my freshman year (Spring 2020), I have been working in Hawkes Lab with Dr. Luke Gockowski on a project regarding the analysis of efficiency in soft, photothermal actuators, which will be submitted to Science Robotics in September 2022. Specifically, I worked with actuators made from plastic (LDPE or Mylar) pouches containing a low boiling-point working fluid (Novec 7000). When the working fluid is heated, the resulting phase change expands the pouch. This expansion allows the pouch to be used as an actuator. In this research project, we were interested in using these pouches as heat engines with the sun as the heat source.

    At the beginning of the project, I was in charge of designing, creating, and testing a wide variety of prototype robots utilizing the pouch actuators, keeping in mind the effects of using a constant heat source. After designing and prototyping many of these passive locomoting devices, we decided to move forward with a hexagonal flipper design where each side of the hexagon contains a leg which opens and rotates the hexagon onto the next side.

    During the second year of the project, I went on to run over a hundred experiments characterizing the actuators and verifying the thermodynamic models we developed. This was done using a specially built testing rig and Arduino IDE. I also created multiple figures for the final paper, making use of my experience as an illustrator.

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This project is currently submitted to Soft Robotics.