Engineering researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created something they’re calling “liquid pistons” that pave the way for lenses that can focus with no moving parts. The technology works like this: oscillating droplets of ferrofluid precisely displace a surrounding liquid on a substrate that’s currently the size of a piece of chewing gum; the pulsating motion of the ferrofluid droplets, which are saturated with metal nanoparticles, can be used to pump small volumes of liquid. In other words when you push one of these drops down, the other goes up, similar to how pistons work inside a car, hence the name liquid pistons. The difference here being that this is all done by manipulating voltages versus exerting mechanical force. If this is going way over your head then just think about this: in the future you’ll have a smartphone that’s super thin because camera modules and the lenes on top of said modules will take up less space and will also require less power to operate.
Other uses for liquid pistons include delivering medicine to precise points in the body and creating so called “lab on a chip” devices. What we’d like to see is larger lenses and sensors being brought to market. If these things can be built cheaply, and require almost no power, then why not slap a 1 inch sensor on the back of a smartphone and finally enable image quality capture that can rival a DSLR? Maybe we’re a bit far from that day happening, the lenses on DSLRs are huge, but it’s at least a little bit closer now after this discovery.
No word as to how long we’ll have to wait for this stuff to hit the market, but the guys behind liquid pistons have funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which you may or may not know, but they’re the folks who created the first version of the internet. If they think this liquid piston stuff has a future, then maybe we’ll eventually see it in our lifetimes.