Anisotropic colloidal micromuscles from liquid crystal elastomers.

摘要: Monodomain liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are new materials uniquely suitable for artificial muscles, as they undergo large reversible uniaxial shape changes, with strains of 20–500% and stresses 10–100 kPa, falling exactly into the dynamic range a muscle. LCEs exhibit little to no fatigue over thousands actuation cycles. Their practical use has been limited, however, owing difficulty synthesizing components, achieving consistent alignment during cross-linking across whole material often high nematic-isotropic phase transition temperature. The most widely studied method LC involves mechanical stretching one two steps, which makes fabrication difficult control lends itself mainly samples that can be easily grasped (with sizes order mm). In this article, we describe adapting LCE synthesis microscale objects, monodomain single step, lowering ...