Synthetic biodegradable elastomers are an emerging class of materials with many potential clinical applications including drug delivery and tissue engineering. Biodegradable elastomers offer advantages of structure diversity, tunable properties, and a wide range of processing capabilities. This review highlights some recent developments in various aspects of biodegradable materials synthesis, c...

Smectic elastomers [1] are rubbery materials that have the macroscopic symmetry properties of smectic liquid crystals [2]. They are sure to have intriguing properties, some of which have already been studied experimentally and/or theoretically [1]. Very recently, seminal progress has been made on smectic-C (SmC) elastomers forming spontaneously from a smectic-A (SmA) phase upon cooling. Hiraoka...

Soft elastomers that can exhibit extremely large deformations under the action of an electric field are essential for applications such as soft robotics, stretchable and flexible electronics, energy harvesting among others. The critical limiting factor in conventional electro-actuation materials is occurrence so-called pull-in instability. In this work, we demonstrate extraordinarily simple way...

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Abstract Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) with large electrically-actuated strain can build light-weight and flexible non-magnetic motors. However, dielectric elastomers commonly used in the field of soft actuation suffer from high stiffness, low strength, driving field, severely limiting DEA’s actuating performance. Here we design a new polyacrylate optimized crosslinking network by ratio...

We study the low-frequency, long-wavelength dynamics of soft and semi-soft nematic elastomers using two different but related dynamic theories. Our first formulation describes the pure hydrodynamic behavior of nematic elastomers in which the nematic director has relaxed to its equilibrium value in the presence of strain. We find that the sound-modes structure is identical to that of columnar li...

We model the spontaneous elastic shear deformations of smectic elastomers as they make the thermal transition between the A and C phases. Tilt of the director is accompanied by shear. Unlike nematic elastomers where spontaneous elongation is associated with changes in the magnitude of order, spontaneous distortion in smectics is instead shear and is associated with rotation of the director of t...

This contribution reviews elastomeric materials with photo-actuation behavior with emphasis on thermoplastic elastomers and their composites. The principles of the photo-actuation and the main factors affecting the photo-actuation phenomena of thermoplastic elastomer materials are discussed in detail. The well-performing photoactuating systems involving both statistical and block copolymers-bas...

The effect of a weak magnetic field on vibration transmissibility was investigated for magnetic elastomers with various volume fractions of magnetic particles. Polyurethane elastomers without magnetic particles exhibited a natural frequency at 53 Hz and were insensitive to a magnetic field of 60 mT. The natural frequency for magnetic elastomers with a volume fraction of 0.23 was 115 Hz at 0 mT,...

Mechanochemically responsive (MCR) polymers have been designed to possess unconventional properties such as changing colors, self-healing, and releasing catalysts under deformation. These properties of MCR polymers stem from a class of molecules, referred to as mechanophores, whose chemical reactions can be controlled by mechanical forces. Although extensive studies have been devoted to the syn...