Increasing Information Storage Capacity in Computing Devices Formed from Self-Oscillating Gels

We recently designed an example of “materials that compute”, where the material and computer are one and the same entity, and demonstrated the ability of these systems to perform pattern recognition. Each basic unit in the system encompasses a self-oscillating polymer gel undergoing the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction and an overlaying piezoelectric (PZ) cantilever. Driven by the BZ reaction, each gel periodically swells and shrinks in volume and thereby deflects the overlaying PZ cantilever. The periodic deflection of the PZ plate generates an oscillating electrical voltage, which is transmitted to other units through electrical wires. As a result, the chemo-mechanical oscillation of one BZ gel affects the oscillations of all the other gels. Eventually, the oscillations of the BZ-PZ units achieve in-phase or anti-phase synchronization, enabling the BZ-PZ oscillator network to store and recognize binary patterns. Here, we show that introducing capacitors into the system allows us to modify the system dynamics and create additional stable synchronization modes, thus increasing the information storage capacity in a given BZ-PZ network. We then demonstrate how this extended information storage enhances the functionality of the BZ-PZ networks in performing computational tasks.