Thermoplastic Elastomer. Liquid Crystalline Thermoplastic Elastomer.

n liquid crystalline elastomer materials

Liquid crystalline elastomers (LCEs) exhibit a number of remarkable physical effects, including the unique, high-stroke reversible mechanical actuation when triggered by external stimuli. This article reviews some recent exciting developments in the field of LCE materials with an emphasis on their utilization in actuator applications. Such applications include artificial muscles, industrial man...

Nanoparticle-Liquid Crystalline Elastomer Composites

Liquid crystalline elastomers (LCEs) exhibit a number of remarkable physical effects, including a uniquely high-stroke reversible mechanical actuation triggered by external stimuli. Fundamentally, all such stimuli affect the degree of liquid crystalline order in the polymer chains cross-linked into an elastic network. Heat and the resulting thermal actuation act by promoting entropic disorder, ...

Enhanced Coarse-Graining of Thermoplastic Polyurethane Elastomer for Multiscale Modeling

The objective of this work is to develop a multiscale modeling tool of copolymers with long chains. We propose an enhanced coarse-graining method of thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) with three beads. The proposed coarse-graining provides an accurate molecular modeling tool to keep the molecular interaction together with computational efficiency. The coarse-grained model with three beads is furt...

Thermal and Morphological Properties of Thermoplastic Elastomer Nanocomposites Based on PA6/NBR

High-throughput Fabrication of Advanced 3d Microfluidic Devices in Thermoplastic Elastomer for Biological Probe Immobilization

We have developed a process based on hot-embossing lithography (HEL) to pattern at high-throughput micron-size through-holes in thin thermoplastic elastomer (TPE) membranes. This novel HEL process, which is shown to provide key advantages for microfluidics applications, was applied to the fabrication of highly-integrated 3D microfluidic devices designed to precisely immobilize biomolecules on t...