Low-power focused-laser-assisted remote ignition of nanoenergetic materials and application to a disposable membrane actuator

Ignition of nanoenergetic materials (nEMs) has great potential for various portable and disposable actuator applications due to the unique ability to release pressure in a controllable manner. The development of highly efficient low-power igniters is very important in this context. Here we present a focused-laser-assisted nEMs igniter that can be remotely operated at low power with a portable laser pointer. The proposed optical igniter is monolithically integrated with a polymeric lens and prepared by a very simple, fast, and reproducible single-step soft-lithographic replication process using polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). The polymeric lens plays a crucial role in greatly enhancing the laser power density on a target area by efficiently concentrating the incident laser beam, generating thermal energy enough to ignite nEMs. A pressure-driven membrane actuator is fabricated by integrating a thin PDMS membrane to the nEMs-coated optical igniter, and the actuation behavior is characterized in response to pressure released by nEMs ignition with different numbers of nEMs coats. Finally, the pressure-driven membrane actuator is demonstrated in an alarm switch to trigger stable operation of an electric buzzer with a blinking light-emitting diode as a potential application.