The world is expected to generate 74.7 million tonnes of e-waste by 2030. However, e-waste contains toxic elements like heavy metals, plastics and flame retardants. When disposed of in landfills or burned in incinerators, these can pose a significant ecological and environmental threat. This issue is exacerbated by the challenges associated with e-waste recycling.
To address this issue, Assistant Professor Tan Yu Jun from NUS Mechanical Engineering is looking to improve the durability of electronic devices, and extend their lifespan, by incorporating self-healing or self-repairing materials into their design. In particular, she is exploring the use of such materials in soft robotics.
For this, Asst Prof Tan turns to biomaterials, which are natural, self-repairable, reusable, recyclable, and biodegradable. She has developed a jellyfish-like material that is transparent, electrically conductive and can autonomously self-heal in both dry and wet conditions. The material can be used to create touch, pressure and strain sensors, and can be 3D printed into soft ionic circuit boards.
Her research also touches on intelligent homeostasis systems in robots. For example, self-adaptive or self-healing systems that can identify defects, initiate healing, and monitor healing progress. These are akin to human organs. Robots with the ability to autonomously perform repair functions are useful for tasks in unpredictable environments like search and rescue missions.
Designing eco-sustainable materials and deploying green and intelligent soft robots is just one step towards the creation of the value-added sustainable technologies that the world so urgently needs.
Developing sustainable "biocircular" soft robots from novel self-healing biomaterials
A new highly conductive material that can stretch to 22 times its original length and heal cracks almost instantaneously
HELIOS, the new stretchable and self-healing material, is able to exhibit highly visible illumination at much lower operating voltages, when used in light-emitting capacitor devices
Tan, Y. J. (2022). Harnessing the circular economy to develop sustainable soft robots. Science Robotics, 7 (63), eabn8147.
Tan, Y. J., Susanto, G. J., Anwar Ali, H. P., & Tee, B. C. (2021). Progress and Roadmap for Intelligent Self-Healing Materials in Autonomous Robotics. Advanced Materials, 33 (19), 2002800.
Tan, Y. J., Godaba, H., Chen, G., Tan, S. T. M., Wan, G., Li, G., ... & Tee, B. C. (2020). A transparent, self-healing and high-κ dielectric for low-field-emission stretchable optoelectronics. Nature Materials, 19 (2), 182-188.
Guo, H., Tan, Y. J., Chen, G., Wang, Z., Susanto, G. J., See, H. H., ... & Tee, B. C. (2020). Artificially innervated self-healing foams as synthetic piezo-impedance sensor skins. Nature communications, 11 (1), 1-10.
Cao, Y., Tan, Y. J., Li, S., Lee, W. W., Guo, H., Cai, Y., ... & Tee, B. C. K. (2019). Self-healing electronic skins for aquatic environments. Nature Electronics, 2 (2), 75-82.
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