 Hello. Okay. Is this a good level to stand up? Awesome. Yeah, I'd just like to mention that before I set up here The tech guys had to ask me if I knew how to use windows. It's that sort of festival. So yeah, I'm gonna be talking about shape-changing nature and ways that we as Humans can seek to emulate it learn from it and use some of those tricks So if you don't want to hear about flowers that throw their seeds meters Sea creatures that change shape or 3d printers that print things that assemble themselves Leave now. It's fine. I won't take it personally And my name is scary I prefer to be named by that but if you want to look up my professional work You'll need to use the name under which they pay me and that's Kate Oliver and there's my Twitter handle So if you want to heckle me throughout the show, that's how you do it So I work in shape change and basically this consists of spending most of my days looking enviously at pine cones and wishing I could do what they do and Why would I be envious of such a simple item? Well, the pine cone it opens when it's dry to disperse its seeds But it can close when it's wet to keep its seeds safe and prevent them from rotting It does all this with no centralized control. It's just distributed through the pine cone Which is made of biodegradable materials. It works with no power. It can be dropped from the tree and still work with no adverse effects and It's a pretty cool piece of tech for something that is incredibly simple And what are these aspects that we'd like to get well if you were to build a synthetic pine cone You'd need something that would detect moisture then some way of transmitting what that level was to some sort of logic That would then decide what action to take based on that then transmit that action to some sort of actuator And that's five things that could go wrong or be interrupted That's five things that could be hacked It's five things that take energy. It's five things that maybe need to be connected to a grid I've mentioned that it's responsive, which is something that I'll come to in the next section about what I think That's a really necessary thing, but pine cones are also really resilient because If you snap off half the scales or even most of one scale it will still work And if you compare that to my five element synthetic setup, you just can't get equivalent performance And what could we do if we could harness something as good as the handle pine cone? So I think this is the future and that's why I work in it and because it's the future there aren't many photos of it yet So I'm just sort of gonna gonna sketch some ideas at you and I leave you to imagine a lot of this for yourself so One of the major uses I think is environmental if we're talking about reacting to what's going on around you Why not have an umbrella that only opens when the sun is shining? Why not have a vent that automatically opens when the temperature gets over a certain amount? This is a wall designed by architects at the University of Stuttgart using working with computer scientists and it opens when it's When it's sunny and warm to let a breeze through and then it closes when it's wet to provide shelter And this is all automatic. There's no control needed and this would survive a car driving through it Which again, I challenge you to do with actuators Medical applications a lot of the time we want to insert something into somebody as a replacement for what's broken That would work a lot better if we could have it fold up and then when it's inserted and then deploy inside the body That would mean a lot less trauma at the insert site a lot less healing time Robots, they're good aren't they? So it would be nice if we had a wider variety of actuators and sensors to use with robots at the moment We're looking at a very kind of stiff Model for elements that robots are made out of something that's softer and more human compatible Something that's less binary something that has more intelligence and reactivity built in would give a lot more options for robot design They could use it for products if you Imagine a spanner that changes size depending on the frequency of light that you hit it with you need a lot fewer spanners In science, we'd like to have basically all of this and more So it would be really nice if we could buy all our stuff flat-packed and then it would build itself instead of us having to deal It we could have a microscope that focus a lens that increased its It's focusing power depending on the amount of light that was hitting it there's a lot of things that are possible and all of these things that I've mentioned are theoretically possible now and This is just the start of expanding a design space that shape-changing materials could let us access so I'm going to do a bit of a review of Natural aspects of shape change that we basically like to ogle then talk about Aspects of it that we've successfully managed to copy and then afterwards. I'd like to throw the Throw the field open to you guys and highlight some areas that I think that makers and hobbyists can really Contribute to shape-changing materials because you've done it an awful lot for loads of other fields and I'd like to start a discussion about this So ogling these are pictures of cool shape-changing natural things And I don't really place these here to show you new things I place them here to kind of suggest some stuff that you might want to go and look up on your own Because you'll basically get a much better idea of it if you have the time to sit and look at it on your own But I've got here will this video play no this video will not play. Sorry. I don't know how to go back. There we go So this is a plant that deploys itself There's an octopus which in its uniquely creepy way completely changes its texture of its skin Look at those little spikes that is not natural. That's not normal This is a Cornish mallow, which is a fairly common plant But it's a it's actually got analog logic encoded in its leaves that enables the leaves to turn and keep themselves at 90 degrees to the Sun to avoid overheating and this is work that's ongoing at the University of Bristol where I'm studying And down at the bottom here the little mushroom cloud. That's actually a sphagnum moss deploying a cloud of spores So there's a lot that nature can do. Let's look at how it does it General principle of plant shape change plants are basically water They basically accept more water or squeeze out more water But to do more interesting things than that to avoid just basically getting bigger and getting smaller They have cellulose which is laid into the plant cells So I've got a sketch here of kind of little cells as blocks And they've got the cellulose laid in in different directions and the direction that the cellulose is laid in The plant can't expand because the cellulose is pretty tough However, it can move the cellulose five is further apart so it can expand in the other direction I'm from this really simple principle of aligned bits of cellulose and Swelling you can build systems that bend and you can build hinges which I've got sketched in the bottom And this bending is basically how pine cones work And this hinge is basically a sketch of how we could start to build up the sort of things that we think of in human centric context Um, can plants do more than that? Sure they can So this is a plant called a fillery which is native to the Mediterranean. It's about this big and It manages to fire its own seeds half a meter Using just the power of it drying out in the Sun and it does this because it's got those cellulose alignments like I was talking about and The cellulose in the cells is aligned. That's what you see in the bottom picture here That's a scanning electron microscope image of the alignment of the fibers That makes the cells tilt the cells then make the fibers They're in tilt and spiral then the spirals come together to make more spirals and as they dry out They contract and contract and wind the spiral tighter until the spiral becomes so tight that the material isn't strong enough to hold up against its own pressure and it snaps and launches that seed a meter away and Thus enables the plant to spread over a wider range so from the simple act of contraction We've gone to ballistics and how good is that compared to what humans can do pretty good so I did these rough calculations and they're based on Energy equivalent in the volume so you've got a bit of a penalty because it has to fire itself So if it's pretty heavy, it's got a heart it needs more energy to get itself moving But then it can store more energy, so it's a bit of a trade-off, but you can see here that No, I can't do a pointer. You'll just have to sort of work with it So Fillory can fire itself in the absence of drag because all these equations are easier if you pretend you're in a vacuum So in the absence of drag fillery can fire itself two and a half meters That's a lot better than a muscle. So from this we learned that if plants were made of meat, they wouldn't work We have you would which is one of the best woods in terms of energy energy for weight Which is why it was such a boon to archers We learned that shape memory alloy is really good But shape memory polymers will come back to them later are much better But theoretically carbon nanotubes would be amazing, but in practice they're outdone by spiders So the lesson we are learning here is that on this kind of you know, rather artificial metric I've just slammed together because I wanted a graph of like ballistics that Human materials are not up to the scratch of what can be done in the natural world yet And there's a lot of potential for expansion and this is part of a paper. I've got submitting at the moment Can plants be fast? Yes, they can be fast. So this is a Venus flytrap And Venus flytraps work by having that really gentle swelling motion And I have a really gentle gradual motion, but they apply it really cunningly So they've got a structure which flips between concave and convex You can see it on the bottom of the drawing here and it's like those little rubber things that used to get in cereal boxes when you're a kid I don't know if anyone else had those Like it's just a little cap and then you push a thumb on it turn it inside out And then it pops and unleashes all that all that stored energy in the rubber and flies into the air Yeah, so you've got basically a small swelling applied to a point where it's just Balanced on the edge of being between two states and that small push is enough to flip it between two states and release a lot of Energy fast enough that this this happens in a hundred microseconds milliseconds sorry order of magnitude Several orders of magnitude But it's quick enough to catch a fly is my major point So that's plants. Let's have a little chat about animals so These are the general layout of muscles are muscles and indeed muscles muscles So this is two lots of interlinked fibers and the blue ones here are acting and the red ones are myosin And they're kind of interlocking and what happens is that? When calcium is released the myosin sort of climbs its way along the actin sort of cinching it in and then The two things slide together and the general volume decreases now What's really interesting here is that we do that temporarily and we need to keep feeding those muscles to keep that reaction going But muscles and clams They use a big muscle to hold their shells shut to keep their entire body soft body Protected against every predator out there that wants to eat them and they're able to exert five times more power than our muscles are And they can just lock them and leave them like that for days It's not entirely known the mechanism of how they do this But it seems like they make temporary bonds between these actin and myosin So while we need to keep the myosin clawing along the actin they can just put a lock on it and basically come back later So this is a really interesting model for low energy use and an idea of how we might want to steal this idea for our own thoughts and Finally, this is a sea cucumber, which is basically a floppy belly on legs Not really many legs more kind of fibery pointy things And it's got a problem in that it needs to be floppy sometimes and it needs to be hard sometimes and Given the amount of comments I got on a YouTube video for saying this needs to be small I can only imagine the innuendo I'm gonna get for that one But it has this problem in that it needs to get through small holes in the rocks But it also needs to be tough to give itself as much protection as it can give So it's got skin that can flip from being like a rubbery kind of stretchy consistency to being as tough as the cartilage in the top of your ear or cartilage anywhere else, but that's probably the easiest bit to feel And it does that by switching on and off the bonds between the reinforcements in its in its skin, so If we just review that when we're looking at animal shape change, we're looking at networks We're looking at things that are related things that slide across each other things that turn bonds on and off So we've got a couple of elements there to think about We've got our plants swelling based and we've got our animal network and bond based and a really good Interesting material we've got that does some things like the animal shape change is shape memory polymers So here I've got a sketch of that and this basically works by having a network that's got two kinds of bonds It's got one kind that's fixed which we call the net points and these might be chemical bonds Or they might be little crystals that hold the materials together And it's got temporary bonds which are here represented by the green triangles and these might be like hydrogen bonds or Something else that's a little bit weaker and basically you put in some stimulus usually that's heat and then The the weak bonds switch off and you can pull them apart And then if you hold it deformed it will stay in that shape because the temporary bonds will kind of adapt to that new Shape you put it into however if you heat it up again Those other little bonds will just pop out and the network goes back to its original shape And this is why we call it a shape memory polymer because it's memorized the first shape that it's gone into But you can take it into an intermediary shape with no problems, and it will just rest there until you put in more impetus And this is where I kind of get on to the really interesting, you know What can we do with synthetic tech section of it? So you can mix shape memory polymers and if they activated different temperatures when you make a blend of them You get a blend that is activated at some temperature between the two temperatures of the different shape memory polymers and this is work from Georgia Tech and they use two plastics one rubber in one hard and Basically, they use different combinations of them and depending on how much of the black polymer versus how much of the white polymer They've got you get a temperature that's either closer to the black polymer or the white polymer So they can program a sequence of folds and here at the bottom of the picture. I couldn't find a video Sorry There's a little box that folds itself up So it folds over one tab first and the second tab then it wraps up then the final tab goes in It's a self-assembling thing. It's printed on a commercially available 3d printer. The commercially available 3d printer is very expensive I will get on to that later Secondly collapsing origami so talking about our units our bonds are connected things that change their orientation This is I really hope I can get the video working for this This is collapsing origami, which is based on snapology origami It's been around quite a while and they've added a small pneumatic element so that this can be controlled remotely And this thing is capable of flexing in all sorts of different ways I'm gonna can I play this I Wish there was someone here who could work Windows Okay, I suggest everyone goes away and looks up that origami video because it's cool I'm just gonna try and play it. No, it doesn't seem to be doing it right fine I'm just gonna give you extra description instead that I'll teach you So plant-based swelling so plant-based swelling remember We've got our general area that expands or contracts and we shaped that by laying in cellulose at different angles well, this is work by Lewis at the vice Institute in Harvard and they've got a swelling gel matrix with cellulose in it and they 3d print it and As it goes through the nozzle of the 3d printer the cellulose aligns because of the effects of flow And so as it traces out it leaves cellulose Along the direction that it printed so they've got a way of Organizing the cellulose inside this expanding print in a very complicated manner and what they do is these kind of Deformed grid like shapes and they've developed a mathematical model where they can take a curved surface and then back construct The shape of the grid they need to print in order to get this network to fold up into a lovely Convoluted curved gentle service surface, sorry So this is suggested for sorry, there's a video on the internet This is suggested for use in making tissue constructs because we've got a major problem at the moment in that we can make some Stem cells just about we can lay them out in a dish, but that is 2d and you may have noticed that your organs are 3d and The 3d is crucial to their function But if we could print them in 2d and then get them to self-assemble into 3d that would solve some of the problem So this is kind of where I throw it open to you guys I think there are many open problems in shape changing and I think that hobbyists have done an awful lot to Contribute to electronics to contribute to 3d printing just to name two examples And I think this field is right for you guys to contribute So I mentioned the 3d printing and I mentioned that the printer that was used to do that shape memory polymer blend was incredibly Expensive it's a hundred and twenty thousand dollars and that's the entry-level model So if you wanted to replicate that I think it's not beyond our skills to create an open source printer That is able to mix two filaments on the fly On the top here. I've got an example of a print that's just done with straightforward PLA That's shape change that's possible just with regular PLA and a few layers. There's there's possibility there without even developing any chemistry Open source stereo lithography would be really lovely. I know there's a few models there I've got one here, but it would be really nice to get that going and it'd be nice to have more printing materials to work with And you may be thinking I am not a chemist. This is totally not my thing. That is fine Mechanical design or origami so that catch mechanism I was talking about the things that interdigitate slide over each other and then have a bond Could you make something that was like that modular origami? I mean these designs are coming from people who are at home playing with origami These these are not people who have necessarily formal training. These are people from all backgrounds Could we make something like chain mail meets velcro? Where it collapses and then hooks and then when you heat it up the hooks come back Would that be a good way of changing volume and changing space? There's could you use some idea like the Venus flytrap to get something that's what that snapped really quickly and on the Right here's some work out of MIT. That's some a design element that uses a simple That uses the simple aspect of cylinders and discs to convert a bending rod into a curve of a prescribed a prescribed tightness and size by modulating the size of the cylinders or Might you be a designer or a potential user? Can you think of a thing that would be really cool if you could change that shape? So this is MIT Media Lab, which I unashamedly love and The top one is a photo of materials which have bonded to them a biofilm which Contracts when it experiences moisture. So it's a fabric that opens up little vents when you're sweaty Really like it at the bottom. There's something that perhaps they're slightly less need for it's a it's a cup of tea That tells you when it's done The the leaf the leaf wilts as a British person I feel a little bit unsure about this, but I'm sure there may be other Applications or you know are you like well people are trying to do this But actually I don't think it will work at all unless you do it like this Do you have requirements that you need or would you like to volunteer for some concept studies? So as a rapper, I'm mentioning shape change materials. I'm working in shape changing materials I'm doing a blue sky proud PhD on shape changing materials because I genuinely think they have some potential to address the vast amount of waste we create on massive energy debt and A whole load of problems that we have facing us in the world at the moment. I know it's a start I know it's very early on but we need to be thinking about what options we might have available And I think smart materials are going to be a really easy way to passively manage our energy use without having to actually Sell people on it So here's my contact details There's my Twitter and I've put these slides online if you want to look up the references and everything afterwards Well, you may not want to that's fine, too And these are the kind people who are paying for me to do my PhD. Thank you I Can take questions if you like or you can come and find me afterwards as well. Does anybody have a question? Okay, just raise your end. I'll bring the mic Thanks The shape-changing polymer as you were talking about are they you know commercially available that they're shifting what sir? Polymers yes, so polyurethane, which is one shape memory polymer. It's water responsive That is you can buy that as ninja flex as a as a principal polymer There are other ones which can be formed quite easily From biofilms paper has some of these properties for the moisture response For the heat response I don't know whether you guys would be able to get hold of them They're fairly low-grade for me in terms of chemical safety at uni But I don't know whether these suppliers would sell to regular people, but you can certainly work with moisture Responsive things at home and also any thermosetting plastic will also do the job My question and for what's worth scientific suppliers normally have no problem selling to ordinary people We still have seven minutes for questions. So if you have any please raise your hand if not, well so for the videos you want to look up the vise Institute and the origami and cellulose, but if you just type in 4d printing or Metamaterial shape-changing metamaterial you'll find most of that stuff So unless we've got any more burning questions, and I think you can totally locate me around site at some point Thank you everybody