Bio-mimic Motion of Elastic Material Dispersed with Hard-magnetic Particles

Recently, many researches on biomimetics have been reported, in which soft motions of natural creatures have also been targeted. Among them, cilia are attracting natural soft organ, which is an effective fluidic system in the natural world. Cilium is a simple hair-like organ; however, it works in a non-simple way. For example, beating pattern of natural cilium consists of 2 types of different stroke patterns; effective stroke and recovery stroke. We focused on a cilium as our target as a simple cantilever of a soft elastic material. We have already developed artificial cilia with magnetic elastomers. In this research, we compared cantilever beams with soft- and hard- magnetic particles. In this paper, we performed 2 experiments to compare the characteristics of cantilevers with 2 types of magnetic powders. In the first experiment, we utilized neodymium magnets that could be controlled the angle in order to observe the motion of beams in the static state. The latter one, we actuated beams in rotating magnetic fields to obtain dynamic behavior of an artificial cilium. As a result, we showed some differences between soft- and hard- magnetic materials.