Abstract When a liquid crystal elastomer layer is bonded to an elastic layer, it creates bilayer with interesting properties that can be activated by applying traction at the boundaries or optothermal stimulation. Here, we examine wrinkling responses in three-dimensional nonlinear systems containing monodomain and homogeneous isotropic incompressible hyperelastic such one thin compared other. T...

The need for mechanical manipulation during the curing of conventional liquid crystal elastomers diminishes their applicability in the field of shape-programmable soft materials and future applications in additive manufacturing. Here we report on polymer-dispersed liquid crystal elastomers, novel composite materials that eliminate this difficulty. Their thermal shape memory anisotropy is imprin...

It was long expected and recently shown that main-chain liquid crystalline elastomers (MC-LCEs) may serve as high performance soft actuators due to a coupling of their intrinsic characteristics of high, yet labile, ordering and network strain. Here, we present the synthesis of new siloxane-based smectic MC-LCEs. These new materials exhibit a unique thermomechanical behavior known as the shape m...

Biomimetic, entirely soft robots with animal-like behavior and integrated artificial nervous systems will open up totally new perspectives and applications. However, until now all presented studies on soft robots were limited to partly soft designs, since all designs at least needed conventional, stiff, electronics to sense, process signals and activate actuators. We present the first soft robo...

Nematic elastomers and glasses deform spontaneously when subjected to temperature changes. This property can be exploited in the design of heterogeneously patterned thin sheets that deform into a non-trivial shape when heated or cooled. In this paper, we start from a variational formulation for the entropic elastic energy of liquid crystal elastomers and we derive from it an effective two-dimen...

Main chain liquid crystal elastomers exhibit several interesting phenomena, such as three different regimes of elastic response, unconventional stress-strain relationship in one of these regimes, and the shape memory effect. Investigations are beginning to reveal relationships between their macroscopic behavior and the nature of domain structure, microscopic smectic phase structure, relaxation ...

Biological soft tissues exhibit elastic properties which can be dramatically different from rubber-type materials (elastomers). To gain a better understanding of the role of constitutive relationships in determining material responses under loads we compare three different types of instabilities (two in compression, one in extension) in hyperelasticity for various forms of strain energy functio...