4D Printed Light?Responsive Patterned Liquid Crystal Elastomer Actuators Using a Single Structural Color Ink

Liquid crystals: Printed actuators in a flap.

news & views possibilities for such devices in general. In particular, omnidirectional retroreflectors are likely to find use wherever back-reflecting mirrors are required whose alignment is hard to fix. Although perhaps less striking in its physical effect than a perfect lens or an invisibility cloak, the work of Ma et al. demonstrates that other devices hitherto confined to theory can be prac...

Topology optimization for the design of folding liquid crystal elastomer actuators.

Aligned liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are capable of undergoing large reversible shape change in response to thermal stimuli and may act as actuators for many potential applications such as self-assembly and deployment of micro devices. Recent advances in LCE patterning tools have demonstrated sub-millimetre control of director orientation, enabling the preparation of materials with arbitrar...

Electrospun Composite Liquid Crystal Elastomer Fibers

We present a robust method to prepare thin oriented nematic liquid crystalline elastomer-polymer (LCE-polymer) core-sheath fibers. An electrospinning setup is utilized to spin a single solution of photo-crosslinkable low molecular weight reactive mesogens and a support polymer to form the coaxial LCE-polymer fibers, where the support polymer forms the sheath via in situ phase separation as the ...

Tunable lenses using transparent dielectric elastomer actuators.

Focus tunable, adaptive lenses provide several advantages over traditional lens assemblies in terms of compactness, cost, efficiency, and flexibility. To further improve the simplicity and compact nature of adaptive lenses, we present an elastomer-liquid lens system which makes use of an inline, transparent electroactive polymer actuator. The lens requires only a minimal number of components: a...

ITO-Free, Compact, Color Liquid Crystal Devices Using Integrated Structural Color Filters and Graphene Electrodes