News Finding: Look around and you'll likely see something that runs on an electric motor.
Paper Finding: This results in a quadratic increase in force density as dimensions are reduced.
News Context: Look around and you'll likely see something that runs on an electric motor. But these qualities change for the worse when such motors are shrunk down to sizes smaller than a cubic centimeter. The actuators move with a level of precision, efficiency, and power that has not yet been possible at the microscale.
Paper Context: Scaling to smaller dimensions: Force, power, and efficiency Increasing the power density of microhydraulic actuators is straightforward: Decreasing droplet pitch and height reduces the droplet mass per width quadratically, whereas force per droplet width stays constant, at approximately the surface tension. This results in a quadratic increase in force density as dimensions are reduced. The actuation velocity stays roughly constant, because the increased force is counterbalanced by increased viscous losses.