Liquid Metal-Based Soft Microfluidics

Motivated by the increasing demand of wearable and soft electronics, liquid metal (LM)-based microfluidics has been subjected to tremendous development in the past decade, especially in electronics, robotics, and related fields, due to the unique advantages of LMs that combines the conductivity and deformability all-in-one. LMs can be integrated as the core component into microfluidic systems in the form of either droplets/marbles or composites embedded by polymer materials with isotropic and anisotropic distribution. The LM microfluidic systems are found to have broad applications in deformable antennas, soft diodes, biomedical sensing chips, transient circuits, mechanically adaptive materials, etc. Herein, the recent progress in the development of LM-based microfluidics and their potential applications are summarized. The current challenges toward industrial applications and future research orientation of this field are also summarized and discussed.

受可穿戴和柔性电子设备需求不断增长的推动，基于液态金属（LM）的微流体在过去十年中取得了巨大发展，特别是在电子、机器人及相关领域，这是由于液态金属集导电性和可变形性于一体的独特优势。液态金属可以以液滴/小球的形式，或者以聚合物材料嵌入且呈各向同性和各向异性分布的复合材料的形式，作为核心组件集成到微流体系统中。人们发现液态金属微流体系统在可变形天线、柔性二极管、生物医学传感芯片、瞬态电路、机械自适应材料等方面具有广泛应用。在此，对基于液态金属的微流体的发展及其潜在应用的最新进展进行了总结。还对该领域面向工业应用的当前挑战以及未来研究方向进行了总结和讨论。