Shape-programmable liquid crystal elastomer structures with arbitrary three-dimensional director fields and geometries

Abstract

Liquid crystal elastomers exhibit large reversible strain and programmable shape transformations, enabling various applications in soft robotics, dynamic optics, and programmable origami and kirigami. The morphing modes of these materials depend on both their geometries and director fields. In two dimensions, a pixel-by-pixel design has been accomplished to attain more flexibility over the spatial resolution of the liquid crystal response. Here we generalize this idea in two steps. First, we create independent, cubic light-responsive voxels, each with a predefined director field orientation. Second, these voxels are in turn assembled to form lines, grids, or skeletal structures that would be rather difficult to obtain from an initially connected material sample. In this way, the orientation of the director fields can be made to vary at voxel resolution to allow for programmable optically- or thermally-triggered anisotropic or heterogeneous material responses and morphology changes in three dimensions that would be impossible or hard to implement otherwise.

Locally controllable magnetic soft actuators with reprogrammable contraction-derived motions

“…By CAN-enabled welding, magneto-controlled actuators with more complex geometry and integrated functions can be nicely designed and fabricated ( 51 , 52 ). Bond exchange can be activated by AMF, which facilitates magnetic welding.…”

Advances in 4D printing of liquid crystalline elastomers: materials, techniques, and applications

“…These voxels can be assembled into various complexes using UV glue, including lines, grids, or skeletal structures. 157 The extremely high resolution of TPP has enabled the sophisticated design of LCE-based microrobots, which can hardly achieve by other fabrication methods.…”

Evolving from Laboratory Toys towards Life-Savers: Small-Scale Magnetic Robotic Systems with Medical Imaging Modalities

“…In the past several decades, small-scale robotics has been attracting an increasing amount of attention from researchers, entrepreneurs, and healthcare professionals. These miniature devices have the potential to access hard-to-reach regions in human bodies and perform unprecedented medical procedures in a minimally invasive manner [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. In early 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) as a pandemic.…”