Motor-muscle

Fractal structuring of metamaterials can avoid linear increase of actuation range loss due to e.g. radiation induced damage. SVG

Artificial motor-muscles (suggestion: Mokels) are actuators out of an active diamondoid metamaterial that can perform pull but also push action with high energy densities beyond the ones seen in biological muscles tissue and even beyond combustion engines like it's typical [add ref] for all AP technologies of technology level III. On the small scale they resemble some form of motors but on the large scale they seem sort of like a crystalline muscle thus the term motor-muscle.

The material consists out of many minimal sized active units. Each of them contains one or more electromechanical or chemomechanical motors that extend or shrink the units length. For fault tolerance a the units must be connected parallel and serial in a hierarchical fractal fashion [TODO add info-graphic].

When a mokel metamaterial is actuated a volume changing extension or shrinkage takes place. This is in contrast to interfacial drives (which are essentially infinitesimal bearings with motor/generator cells included) where only a shear deformation is present which does not change the actuators volume.

With motor-muscles built out of modular microcomponents beside electromechanical converters or chemomechanical converters other microcomponents like energy storage cells could directly be incorporated (possibly in a choosable ratio) instead of feeding the energy in from an external source. This way one can trade efficiency (through lowering of power transport distance) for maximal force and power density.

All the power-supply infrastructure for the motors must be incorporated making the design quite complex. Combining mokel with metamaterial elasticity in the directions normal to the pulling action (transversal directions) and making the mokel long and thin one gains some kind of active rope.

Mokel would undoubtedly provide a boost for robotic engineering.

Due to their high power density mokel can be distributed sparsely into active materials. Chemical energy storage in contrast has high volume but can be located far off sight since with AP technology energy transmission is easy.

Thin sheet and balloon muscle-motor mocles

Due to high power an force densities
the macroscale analogy to a biological muscle in performance
could be just a thin stripe pf material.
Rooled up it could be a possible high pressure gas inflated hollow tubular "balloon".
See page: Gem-gum balloon products

Chemomechanical converters as nanomotors

Caveat: Connection to the chemical energy transportation as a bottleneck for power density.

Unlike power density chemical energy density is already almost at the physical limit
with today's liquid hydrocarbons like gasoline, ethanol, and whatnot.
Future chemical energy storages used by efficiency optimized chemomechanical converter metamaterials
will most likely have a bit lower energy density than above listed liquid fuels.

To keep the mocle muscle-motor thin-film and separate from the energy storage,
the energy needs to be long range macroscale distance transported
into the mocle muscle-motor to there be chemomechanicaly converted
to mechanical motion inside of cheomechanical motors (e.g. covalent bond zippers).

For high power density applications that transport might become a bottleneck.
Thereby motivating the inclusion of energy storage metamatrial right into the mocle muscel-motor metamaterial.
A combined chemical energy storage and chemomechanical conversion metamaterial.
Loosing some seperatiion of concerns.

The big disadvantage with this is that this would massively increase its volume and mass of the "energy-storage-mocle" metamaterial.
Moving mass that is not the payload is usually what one will want to avoid.
It might be ok for some special niche applications. Low speed high force high power density.

The desire to keep mocle muscle-motors light by implies the need for
long range macrocale transportation in the chemical material into the mokel and depleted carriers out again.
But this limits the power density.

There is an option to escape this dilemma.

Electromechanical converters as nanomotors

For really high power applications fro which mechanical transport of chemical energy storage material become a bottleneck.
Go for an extra detour over electrical energy.
chemomechnical => mechanoelectical => electomechanical
and the reverse for recuperation
all that completely free of any wear

But likely not directly electrochemically.
At least not as in today's batteries that are subject to a lot of wear.
Typically a few 10000 cycles till badly damaged.

Nanotubes can provide superb conductivity beyond copper and silver.
Perhaps some high critical current supercunductive solutions will be found.
Active cooling plus novel superinsualtion metamateruals and or higher critical temperatures.

One possible disadvantage is lower maximal force density compared to chemomechanical converters.
Perhaps not so much an issue for mocle muscle-motors,
but more an issue for driving mechanochemical reactions in productive nanosystems.
Some form of mechanical advantage mechanisms needed to get back to higher force density (pulling/pushing stress).

Extremes

Very high efficiency by nature

Since actuation speeds add up incrementally in a muscle like structure
a macroscale speed of 1m/s at the scale of 1m (human arm) or
a macroscale speed of 100mm/s at the scale of 100mm (FFF 3D printer)
translates down to an extremely slow sped of 10nm/s across 10nm.
This allows these devices to operate in extremely high efficiency regimes.
The as of 2026 here explored friction models: Friction in gemstone metamaterial technology …
(That is: Models giving quadratically with speed scaling friction power losses)
… might break down in these regimes and scale differently.
Worse, better, or unchanged. It remains to be determined.

Maybe one get truly zero static friction and remains pretty much in that static friction regime?
See: Supercritically superlubric – Warning! you are moving into more speculative areas.

Maximal speed

The other way around:
Proposed speeds for productive nanosystems are around 4nm/s at 10nm scale.
A lot faster is possible but this increasingly leads to coolability problems.
I.e. only short intermittent burst with long cooling pauses remain possible for the bulk meta-material.

Adding (4nm/s)/10nm up in a motor-muscle metamaterial
would lead to an extreme speed of 400m/s at 1mm length of the motor muscle metamaterial already.

• The driving force might give out before
• Very loud sound (possibly dangerous) sound shockwaves shoud be generatable (safety and weapons concern)
• Going even faster inertial forces from accelerations might exceed the tensile strength of any physically possible material.
  Somewhat related topic: Unsupported rotating ring speed limit

Related

• Resilience boost by fractal design
• Fractals in gem-gum nanomachinery
• Nanoscale actuators

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• Infinitesimal bearing … possible a good base metamaterial good base for shear mocles

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• Gem-gum balloon products
• Multi limbed sensory equipped shells