Abstract
ABSTRACTConventional 4D printing technologies are realized by combining 3D printing with soft active materials such as shape memory polymers (SMPs) and hydrogels. However, the intrinsic material property limitations make the SMP or hydrogel-based 4D printing unsuitable to fabricate the actuators that need to exhibit fast-response, reversible actuations. Instead, pneumatic actuations have been widely adopted by the soft robotics community to achieve fast-response, reversible actuations, and many efforts have been made to apply the pneumatic actuation to 3D printed structures to realize passive 4D printing with fast-response, reversible actuation. However, the 3D printing of soft actuators/robots heavily relies on the commercially available UV curable elastomers the break strains of which are not sufficient for certain applications which require larger elastic deformation. In this paper, we present two simple approaches to tune the mechanical properties such as stretchability, stiffness, and durability of the commercially available UV curable elastomers by adding: (i) mono-acrylate based linear chain builder; (ii) urethane diacrylate-based crosslinker. Material property characterizations have been performed to investigate the effects of adding the two additives on the stretchability, stiffness, mechanical repeatability as well as viscosity. Demonstrations of fully printed robotic finger, grippers, and highly deformable 3D lattice structure are also presented.
Highlights
Four-dimensional (4D) printing as an emerging technology has gained great attention due to its capability of enabling three-dimensionally (3D) printed structures to change shape over time upon environmental stimuli such as temperature [1,2,3,4], water [5,6,7,8,9,10,11] and light [12,13]
Examples include printed active composites [3], active origami [4], 4D printed box with sequential folding [14], high-resolution multimaterial 4D printing [15] and others [16,17,18,19]. The fact that it always requires the application of an external load after the completion of a shape memory cycle makes shape memory polymers (SMPs)-based 4D printing unsuitable to applications that require reversible actuation
Many efforts have been made to apply the pneumatic actuation to 3D printed structures to realize fully 3D printed soft actuators/ robots which can be referred to as passive 4D printing with fast-response, reversible actuation [24,25,26,27,28]
Summary
Four-dimensional (4D) printing as an emerging technology has gained great attention due to its capability of enabling three-dimensionally (3D) printed structures to change shape over time upon environmental stimuli such as temperature [1,2,3,4], water [5,6,7,8,9,10,11] and light [12,13]. Many efforts have been made to apply the pneumatic actuation to 3D printed structures to realize fully 3D printed soft actuators/ robots which can be referred to as passive 4D printing with fast-response, reversible actuation [24,25,26,27,28]. We present two simple approaches to tune the mechanical properties such as stretchability, stiffness, and repeatability of the commercially available UV curable elastomers by adding two chemical additives: (i) mono-acrylate based linear chain builder; (ii) urethane diacrylate-based crosslinker. Epoxy Aliphatic Acrylate (EAA) is chosen as the mono-acylate linear chain builder, and Aliphatic Urethane-based Diacrylate (AUD) is chosen as the urethane diacrylate-based crosslinker. For the Tango-AUD system, due to the high viscosity of AUD, the mixing was carried out in an oil bath at 40°C
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