{"id":200714,"date":"2024-12-03T15:26:09","date_gmt":"2024-12-03T21:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/cheerios-effect-inspires-novel-robot-design"},"modified":"2024-12-03T15:26:09","modified_gmt":"2024-12-03T21:26:09","slug":"cheerios-effect-inspires-novel-robot-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/cheerios-effect-inspires-novel-robot-design","title":{"rendered":"Cheerios effect inspires novel robot design"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a common popular science demonstration involving \u201csoap boats,\u201d in which liquid soap poured onto the surface of water creates a propulsive flow driven by gradients in surface tension. But it doesn\u2019t last very long since the soapy surfactants rapidly saturate the water surface, eliminating that surface tension. Using ethanol to create similar \u201ccocktail boats\u201d can significantly extend the effect because the alcohol evaporates rather than saturating the water.<\/p>\n

That simple classroom demonstration could also be used to propel tiny robotic devices across liquid surfaces to carry out various environmental or industrial tasks, according to a preprint<\/a> posted to the physics arXiv. The authors also exploited the so-called \u201cCheerios effect<\/a>\u201d as a means of self-assembly to create clusters of tiny ethanol-powered robots.<\/p>\n

As previously reported<\/a>, those who love their Cheerios for breakfast are well acquainted with how those last few tasty little \u201cO\u201d s tend to clump together in the bowl: either drifting to the center or to the outer edges. The \u201cCheerios effect is found throughout nature, such as in grains of pollen (or, alternatively, mosquito eggs or beetles) floating on top of a pond; small coins floating<\/a> in a bowl of water; or fire ants<\/a> clumping together to form<\/a> life-saving rafts during floods. A 2005 paper<\/a> in the American Journal of Physics outlined the underlying physics, identifying the culprit as a combination of buoyancy, surface tension, and the so-called \u201d meniscus<\/a> effect.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a common popular science demonstration involving \u201csoap boats,\u201d in which liquid soap poured onto the surface of water creates a propulsive flow driven by gradients in surface tension. But it doesn\u2019t last very long since the soapy surfactants rapidly saturate the water surface, eliminating that surface tension. Using ethanol to create similar \u201ccocktail boats\u201d [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,219,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-physics","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200714\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}