Airborne Acoustic Vortex End Effector-based Contactless, Multi-mode, Programmable Control of Object Surfing.

Tweezers based on optical, electric, magnetic, and acoustic fields have shown great potential for contactless object manipulation. However, current tweezers designed for manipulating millimeter-sized objects such as droplets, particles, and small animals, exhibit limitations in translation resolution, range, and path complexity. Here, we introduce a novel acoustic vortex tweezers system, which leverages a unique airborne acoustic vortex end effector integrated with a three degree-of-freedom (DoF) linear motion stage, for enabling contactless, multi-mode, programmable manipulation of millimeter-sized objects.

Inhibiting Shuttle Effect and Dendrite Growth in Sodium-Sulfur Batteries Enabled by Applying External Acoustic Field.

The room-temperature sodium-sulfur (RT Na-S) battery is a promising alternative to traditional lithium-ion batteries owing to its abundant material availability and high specific energy density. However, the sodium polysulfide shuttle effect and dendritic growth pose significant challenges to their practical applications. In this study, we apply diverse disciplinary backgrounds to introduce a novel method to stimulate polarized BaTiO (BTO) nanoparticles on the separator.

Investigation of Viscoelastic Guided Wave Properties in Anisotropic Laminated Composites Using a Legendre Orthogonal Polynomials Expansion-Assisted Viscoelastodynamic Model.

This study investigates viscoelastic guided wave properties (e.g., complex-wavenumber-, phase-velocity-, and attenuation-frequency relations) for multiple modes, including different orders of antisymmetric, symmetric, and shear horizontal modes in viscoelastic anisotropic laminated composites.

Robot-assisted chirality-tunable acoustic vortex tweezers for contactless, multifunctional, 4-DOF object manipulation.

Robotic manipulation of small objects has shown great potential for engineering, biology, and chemistry research. However, existing robotic platforms have difficulty in achieving contactless, high-resolution, 4-degrees-of-freedom (4-DOF) manipulation of small objects, and noninvasive maneuvering of objects in regions shielded by tissue and bone barriers. Here, we present chirality-tunable acoustic vortex tweezers that can tune acoustic vortex chirality, transmit through biological barriers, trap single micro- to millimeter-sized objects, and control object rotation.

Development of a piezo stack - laser Doppler vibrometer sensing approach for characterizing shear wave dispersion and local viscoelastic property distributions.

Laser Doppler vibrometry and wavefield analysis have recently shown great potential for nondestructive evaluation, structural health monitoring, and studying wave physics. However, there are limited studies on these approaches for viscoelastic soft materials, especially, very few studies on the laser Doppler vibrometer (LDV)-based acquisition of time-space wavefields of dispersive shear waves in viscoelastic materials and the analysis of these wavefields for characterizing shear wave dispersion and evaluating local viscoelastic property distributions. Therefore, this research focuses on developing a piezo stack-LDV system and shear wave time-space wavefield analysis methods for enabling the functions of characterizing the shear wave dispersion and the distributions of local viscoelastic material properties.