Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : October 30, 2018 - November 01, 2018
In this paper, we describe a porous hydrogel microfiber that improves temperature responsiveness. We fabricated hydrogel microfiber using a microfluidic device. We successfully encapsulated cellulose nanofibers in the hydrogel microfiber. We succeeded in making porous structures in the hydrogel microfiber by dissolving the cellulose nanofibers. As a result, the temperature responsiveness was improved: the response time of the porous hydrogel microfiber was 90 s when the diameter ratio was 0.9 while that of non-porous hydrogel microfiber was 250 s. We believe that our hydrogel microfibers could be applied to actuators such as soft robots and artificial muscles.
