Abstract
Soft materials that respond to wireless external stimuli are referred to as “smart” materials due to their promising potential in real-world actuation and sensing applications in robotics, microfluidics, and bioengineering. Recent years have witnessed a burst of these stimuli-responsive materials and their preliminary applications. However, their further advancement demands more versatility, configurability, and adaptability to deliver their promised benefits. Here, a dual-stimuli-responsive soft bimorph material with three configurations that enable complex programmable 3D shape-morphing is presented. The material consists of liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) and magnetic-responsive elastomers (MREs) via facile fabrication that orthogonally integrates their respective stimuli-responsiveness without detrimentally altering their properties. The material offers an unprecedented wide design space and abundant degree-of-freedoms (DoFs) due to the LCE's programmable director field, the MRE's programmable magnetization profile, and diverse geometric configurations. It responds to wireless stimuli of the controlled magnetic field and environmental temperature. Its dual-responsiveness allows the independent control of different DoFs for complex shape-morphing behaviors with anisotropic material properties. A diverse set of in situ reconfigurable shape-morphing and an environment-aware untethered miniature 12-legged robot capable of locomotion and self-gripping are demonstrated. Such material can provide solutions for the development of future soft robotic and other functional devices.
Highlights
This page was generated automatically upon download from the ETH Zurich Research Collection
The material consists of liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) and magneticresponsive elastomers (MREs) via facile fabrication that orthogonally intesmart materials.[1,2,3,4,5]
This work reports a bimorph material that combines the respective advantages of LCEs and MREs via a facile fabrication process to widen the material design space and enhance the control versatility
Summary
“smart” materials due to their promising potential in real-world actuation and sensing applications in robotics, microfluidics, and bioengineering. Www.advancedsciencenews.com www.advmat.de and simultaneously exerting both force and torque on the same object.[32] Besides, electromagnetic coil systems and permanent magnets can control the direction, strength, and spatiotemporal variance of a 3D magnetic field This wide range of tunability of these control parameters endows MREs with unparallel versatility in exhibiting multiple different complex shape-morphing behaviors from a single piece of material,[1,33,34,35] while most other active materials can only exhibit a single simpler deformation profile.[36,37] With favorable controllability and versatility, MREs have been widely utilized in soft robots and other devices.[34,38,39,40,41]. This work presents a multiresponsive soft bimorph material created via a facile fabrication approach with complex programmable 3D shape-morphing This material orthogonally integrates the respective stimuli-responsiveness of LCEs and MREs for enhanced versatility and abundant degree-of-freedoms (DoFs) in control. Biomedical tasks, such as minimally invasive surgery and targeted drug delivery, and environmental monitoring and remediation tasks could benefit from the extended design space and local addressability of the reported material
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
