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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Applications of Liquid Crystalline Elastomers

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This chapter focuses on recent developments in the field of liquid crystalline elastomers (LCEs) that bring these materials closer to the world of real applications, concentrating on their actuation properties. First, we briefly introduce different LCE materials that show actuation behavior and explain how they can be synthesized. In the second part, we focus on materials in which a shape change is triggered by a phase transition. In particular, we discuss how the chemistry of the polymeric material influences the strength and direction of the shape change. We review the efforts made to trigger the actuation event by stimuli other than temperature variation. Subsequently, we summarize preparation techniques for various sample geometries of aligned LCEs that all show actuation properties and assign them to particular applications. A short summary is given of devices that have been built in this way. In the third part, we concentrate on actuators that show deformation in an electric field without any phase transition. We start with a short introduction to ferroelectric liquid crystalline elastomers (FLCEs) and discuss molecules exhibiting these phases. Subsequently, we show how the electroclinic effect of FLCEs can be utilized to induce macroscopic deformations by an electric field.