Magnetic Programming of Soft Materials Using Digitally Processed Laser Heating

Spatial programming of magnetic soft materials holds immense potential for wide ranging applications in soft robotics, minimally invasive medicine, and haptic interfaces. Despite tremendous and rapid progress in encoding spatially resolved magnetization directions over soft structures, the currently available approaches employ sequential encoding, resulting in slow and tedious processes with limited throughput. In this paper, we present a rapid and parallel magnetic programming strategy based on digitally processed laser heating. Heating above the Curie temperature of the magnetic microparticles embedded within the soft material allows their facile magnetization in desired directions via small external magnetic fields. To achieve parallel and rapid magnetic programming, we developed an integrated digital laser processing and magnetic field generation system, facilitating generation of desired shapes and patterns at high-resolution. Performance of the pattern generation and magnetic soft material are experimentally evaluated. Employing the described magnetic programming framework, shape-morphing of magnetic soft structures with varying magnetic profiles are shown. The proposed approach establishes a rapid and facile encoding procedure with high-throughput magnetic programming potential.