Agile and multiple modes of self-peristalsis of a slinky-like active gel

The ability of agile internal driving is an essential function for the survival of living organisms, from which more sophisticated adaptive locomotion function may have evolved. A general mechanistic description of agile internal driving of active matter is a challenging task. In this paper, inspired by attacking snake and Slinkey toys, a helical-shaped active gel that hosted Ru (II) catalyzed Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) is used to design agile and diverse move-functions. Experiment result show that, under driving by chemical waves, the helical gel undergoes a relative large-scale self-peristalsis along the axial direction with the amplitude of pitch variation exceeds 123.6%. When the propagating mode of wave changes, diverse mode of self-peristalsis, such as, self-twisting, self-rolling and confined self-rotating, will emergent. Detailed analysis indicated this agile peristalsis evolve from a helical-structure induced flexibility along the axis direction of the gel, which is driven by a collective torque-component generated by local bending of the gel. Duo to diverse propagating mode of chemical waves, various spatiotemporal evolving of stress distribution to generate above self-peristalsis modes. We anticipate our new strategy of high efficiency inter-driving of active materials can be widely applied and adapted to manufacture a variety of dynamic flexibility materials and intelligent active motors.