This is the first-ever book to illustrate the principles and applications of liquid metal biomaterials. Room-temperature liquid metal materials are rapidly emerging as next-generation functional materials that display many unconventional properties superior to those of conventional biomaterials. Their outstanding, unique versatility (“one material, diverse capabilities”) opens many exciting opportunities for the medical sciences. The book reviews representative applications of liquid metal biomaterials from both therapeutic and diagnostic aspects. It also discusses related efforts to employ liquid metals to overcome today’s biomedical challenges. It will provide readers with a comprehensive understanding of the technical advances and fundamental discoveries on the frontier, and thus equip them to investigate and utilize liquid metal biomaterials to tackle various critical problems.

This handbook systematically collects the latest scientific and technological knowledge on liquid metals obtained so far in this cutting edge frontier. Conventional materials such as metals, polymers, composites, ceramics and naturally derived matters, may not perform well when facing certain technological challenges. At around room temperature, most of such materials mainly stay at solid state and are often difficult to shape due to their high melting point. Meanwhile, although classical soft matters own good flexibility, their electrical conductivities including more behaviours appear not good enough which generally limited their utilizations. As a game-changing alternative, the room temperature liquid metal materials are quickly emerging as a new generation functional material which displayed many unconventional properties superior to traditional materials. Their outstanding versatile feature as “One material, diverse capabilities” is rather unique among existing materials and thus opens many exciting opportunities for scientific, technological and industrial developments. This handbook presents comprehensive reference information on liquid metal science and technology that are currently available. The major advancements as made before are collected and summarized. Representative liquid metal applications are illustrated. It helps readers obtain a comprehensive understanding of the technical progresses and fundamental discoveries in the frontier, and thus better explore and utilize liquid metal materials to address various challenging needs.

An up-to-date exploration of the properties and most recent applications of liquid metals In Liquid Metal: Properties, Mechanisms, and Applications, a pair of distinguished researchers delivers a comprehensive exploration of liquid metals with a strong focus on their structure and physicochemical properties, preparation methods, and tuning strategies. The book also illustrates the applications of liquid metals in fields as varied as mediated synthesis, 3D printing, flexible electronics, biomedicine, energy storage, and energy conversion. The authors include coverage of reactive mediums for synthesizing and assembling nanomaterials and direct-writing electronics, and the book offers access to supplementary video materials to highlight the concepts discussed within. Recent advancements in the field of liquid metals are also discussed, as are new opportunities for research and development in this rapidly developing area. The book also includes: A thorough introduction to the fundamentals of liquid metal, including a history of its discovery, its structure and physical properties, and its preparation Comprehensive explorations of the external field tuning of liquid metal, including electrical, magnetic, and chemical tuning Practical discussions of liquid metal as a new reaction medium, including nanomaterial synthesis and alloy preparation In-depth examinations of constructing techniques of liquid metal-based architectures, including injection, imprinting, and mask-assisted depositing Perfect for materials scientists, electrochemists, and catalytic chemists, Liquid Metal: Properties, Mechanisms, and Applications also belongs in the libraries of inorganic chemists, electronics engineers, and biochemists.

This compendium summarizes the core principles and practical applications of a brand-new advanced chip cooling category — liquid metal cooling. It illustrates the science and art of room temperature liquid metal enabled cooling for chip, device and system. The concise volume features unique scientific and practical merits, and clarified intriguing liquid metal coolant or medium behaviors in making new generation powerful cooling system.With both uniquely important fundamental and practical values, this useful reference text benefits researchers to set up their foundation and then find new ways of making advanced cooling system to fulfil the increasingly urgent needs in modern highly integrated chip industry.

Flexible Electronics platforms are increasingly used in the fields of sensors, displays, and energy conversion with the ultimate goal of facilitating their ubiquitous integration in our daily lives. Some of the key advantages associated with flexible electronic platforms are: bendability, lightweight, elastic, conformally shaped, nonbreakable, roll-to-roll manufacturable, and large-area. To realize their full potential, however, it is necessary to develop new methods for the fabrication of multifunctional flexible electronics at a reduced cost and with an increased resistance to mechanical fatigue. Accordingly, this Special Issue seeks to showcase short communications, research papers, and review articles that focus on novel methodological development for the fabrication, and integration of flexible electronics in healthcare, environmental monitoring, displays and human-machine interactivity, robotics, communication and wireless networks, and energy conversion, management, and storage.

Surface engineering provides one of the most important means of engineering product differentiation in terms of quality, performance, and lifecycle cost. It is essential to achieve predetermined functional properties of materials such as mechanical strength, biocompatibility, corrosion resistance, wear resistance, and heat and oxidation resistance. Surface Engineering of Biomaterials addresses this topic across a diverse range of process technologies and healthcare applications. Introduces biomaterial surface science and surface engineering and includes criteria for biomaterial surface selection Focuses on a broad array of materials including metals, ceramics, polymers, alloys, and composites Discusses corrosion, degradation, and material release issues in implant materials Covers various processing routes to develop biomaterial surfaces, including for smart and energy applications Details techniques for post-modification of biomaterial surfaces This reference work helps researchers working at the intersection of materials science and biotechnology to engineer functional biomaterials for a variety of applications.

This book discusses the core principles and practical applications of a brand new machine category: liquid-metal soft machines and motors. After a brief introduction on the conventional soft robot and its allied materials, it presents the new conceptual liquid-metal machine, which revolutionizes existing rigid robots, both large and small. It outlines the typical features of the soft liquid-metal materials and describes the various transformation capabilities, mergence of separate metal droplets, self-rotation and planar locomotion of liquid-metal objects under external or internal mechanism. Further, it introduces a series of unusual phenomena discovered while developing the shape changeable smart soft machine and interprets the related mechanisms regarding the effects of the shape, size, voltage, orientation and geometries of the external fields to control the liquid-metal transformers. Moreover, the book illustrates typical strategies to construct a group of different advanced functional liquid-metal soft machines, since such machines or robots are hard to fabricate using rigid-metal or conventional materials. With highly significant fundamental and practical findings, this book is intended for researchers interested in establishing a general method for making future smart soft machine and accompanying robots.