Stiffness-Tunable Functional Liquid Metal Sponge

Soft robotic materials have rapidly attracted extensive attention in the field of materials research due to their unique and prominent properties. However, the deficiency of the material’s mutable flexible stiffness, greatly impact the performance of the Soft robotic materials, directly hinders the possibility for further amplifying its application scenarios. In this paper, we proposed a functional liquid metal sponge by permeating magnetic liquid metal (MLM) into a fillable sponge. Through regulating the magnetic induction intensity, the stiffness of the MLM-sponge elastomer can be effectively improved to 8 times, and due to the flexibility of sponge as well as the outstanding conductivity of liquid metal, this material has both high flexibility and high conductivity. We found flexible circuits made from this material maintain good electrical conductivity under complex conditions.