Monash University, Australia, announces that its engineering team has developed graphene oxide material one nanometer thick whose shape can be changed almost instantaneously by an electric field.
Led by Dr Zhe Liu, the Monash engineering team has focused on graphene oxide – which is a single atom thick – as an effective shape memory material. “Like the science fiction movie, Fantastic Voyage, our research brings one step closer to intelligent biomedical nano-robots that can be delivered into a living cell for future cellular surgery,” Dr Liu said.
The engineers, from the Monash Centre for Atomically Thin Materials and the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department, made their discovery through computer simulations.
The research was published in Nature Communications.
PhD candidate and first author Zhenyue Chang says the shape memory effect arises from an “atomic switch” enabling a super-fast response. “Aside from being able to transform at high speeds, graphene oxide has many other advantages over existing shape memory materials. It is incredibly light, has a high density-to-strain ratio, is very stable, and is able to perform a relative size change of 15%, compared to shape memory alloys, which change by only 4%.”
