Soft metamaterials with dynamic viscoelastic functionality tuned by pre-deformation

Acoustofluidic large-scale mixing for enhanced microfluidic immunostaining for tissue diagnostics

The usage of microfluidics for automated and fast immunoassays has gained a lot of interest in the last decades. This integration comes with certain challenges, like the reconciliation of laminar flow patterns of micro-scale systems with diffusion-limited mass transport. Several methods have been investigated to enhance microfluidic mixing in microsystems, including acoustic-based fluidic streaming. Here, we report both by numerical simulation and experiments on the beneficiary effect of acoustic agitation on the uniformity of immunostaining in large-size and thin microfluidic chambers. Moreover, we investigate by numerical simulation the impact of reducing the incubation times and the concentrations of the biochemical detection reagents on the obtained immunoassay signal. Finally, acoustofluidic mixing was successfully used to reduce by 80% the incubation time of the Her2 (human epidermal growth factor receptor 2) and CK (cytokeratins) biomarkers for the spatial immunostaining of breast cancer cell pellets, or reducing their concentration by 66% and achieving a higher signal-to-background ratio than comparable spatially resolved immunostaining with static incubation.

Viscoelastic reduced enhanced isotropic continua as acoustic metamaterials

We consider a linear enhanced viscoelastic continuum of general nature but of specific type. Namely, we consider a reduced elastic continuum, satisfying Lagrange equations, where the strain energy depends on a certain (special) vectorial generalized coordinate, but does not depend on its gradient, and then add linear dissipation to the existing elastic connections. We may also represent this model as a 'bearing continuum', where all the connections are present (described by one vectorial generalized coordinate), enriched in each point by a 'distributed dynamic absorber' (described by 'special' vectorial generalized coordinate). We look for free harmonic waves in this infinite medium and obtain a reduced spectral problem for the vectorial generalized coordinate of the bearing continuum, for an arbitrary number of degrees of freedom. It was shown earlier that under certain symmetry conditions in the elastic case we obtain a single negative acoustic metamaterial, i.e. a medium that has band gaps. Further, we consider isotropic and gyrotropic reduced media, described by two three-dimensional vectorial generalized coordinates. First, we generalize results of previous studies for more complex elastic coupling, discovering a polarized shear wave, which has both bandgaps and zones of anomalous refraction. Then we introduce linear dissipation of different kinds. We find that viscosity yields in existence of travelling harmonic waves for all frequencies, possibly except for some points. Logarithmic decrement, infinite for the elastic material in bandgaps, becomes finite and decreases as the dissipation increases, at least for small viscosity. An important observation is: an infinitesimal dissipation in most cases transforms bandgaps into zones of travelling evanescent waves that partially are zones of anomalous refraction (decreasing parts of dispersion curves), where the medium is a double negative acoustic metamaterial. This article is part of the theme issue 'Wave generation and transmission in multi-scale complex media and structured metamaterials (part 2)'.

Force reversal and energy dissipation in composite tubes through nonlinear viscoelasticity of component materials

Fibre-reinforced, fluid-filled structures are commonly found in nature and emulated in devices. Researchers in the field of soft robotics have used such structures to build lightweight, impact-resistant and safe robots. The polymers and biological materials in many soft actuators have these advantageous characteristics because of viscoelastic energy dissipation. Yet, the gross effects of these underlying viscoelastic properties have not been studied. We explore nonlinear viscoelasticity in soft, pressurized fibre-reinforced tubes, which are a popular type of soft actuation and a common biological architecture. Relative properties of the reinforcement and matrix materials lead to a rich parameter space connecting actuator inputs, loading response and energy dissipation. We solve a mechanical problem in which both the fibre and the matrix are nonlinearly viscoelastic, and the tube deforms into component materials’ nonlinear response regimes. We show that stress relaxation of an actuator can cause the relationship between the working fluid input and the output force to reverse over time compared to the equivalent, non-dissipative case. We further show that differences in design parameter and viscoelastic material properties can affect energy dissipation throughout the use cycle. This approach bridges the gap between viscoelastic behaviour of fibre-reinforced materials and time-dependent soft robot actuation.