> Why can't you just add more smaller muscle fibers that work in concert?
Great question. And yes, you can have lots of smaller ones to do the work of a few larger ones. The strength (stress) comes essentially from the cross sectional area of the muscle (or bundle of). And no matter how thin you make the spaghetti, you still need an equivalent volume of it to get the same cross section, For a given length.
The reason speed, as in how many times a second you can make it contract and lengthen, is a limiting factor comes down to good old force = mass x acceleration. Want to make it go faster?then you need higher pressure. So now You have a lot of water you need to move at high pressure with very rapid acceleration. This means the scale of the pumping equipment gets prohibitive very rapidly.
Real muscles work at a fundamental level by a kind of ratcheting mechanism between proteins that pull each other together. This process can happen very quickly. Mammal muscles don’t need to pump lots of liquids around with high acceleration and velocity. So there is actually a lot less inertia from moving mass in real muscle.
Another issue I didn’t touch on in my earlier post is that this kind of muscle is very difficult to do strain and force sensing with. To make motion with this kind of actuator that is both rapid and smooth is extremely difficult and still an open problem.
Great question. And yes, you can have lots of smaller ones to do the work of a few larger ones. The strength (stress) comes essentially from the cross sectional area of the muscle (or bundle of). And no matter how thin you make the spaghetti, you still need an equivalent volume of it to get the same cross section, For a given length.
The reason speed, as in how many times a second you can make it contract and lengthen, is a limiting factor comes down to good old force = mass x acceleration. Want to make it go faster?then you need higher pressure. So now You have a lot of water you need to move at high pressure with very rapid acceleration. This means the scale of the pumping equipment gets prohibitive very rapidly.
Real muscles work at a fundamental level by a kind of ratcheting mechanism between proteins that pull each other together. This process can happen very quickly. Mammal muscles don’t need to pump lots of liquids around with high acceleration and velocity. So there is actually a lot less inertia from moving mass in real muscle.
Another issue I didn’t touch on in my earlier post is that this kind of muscle is very difficult to do strain and force sensing with. To make motion with this kind of actuator that is both rapid and smooth is extremely difficult and still an open problem.