Applications of Liquid Crystalline Elastomers - Liquid Crystal Elastomers: Materials and Applications - page 49

Applications of Liquid Crystalline Elastomers

C. Ohm, M. Brehmer, and R. Zentel

Abstract 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 prepara-
tion 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 crystal-
line elastomers (FLCEs) and discuss molecules exhibiting these phases. Subse-
quently, we show how the electroclinic effect of FLCEs can be utilized to induce
macroscopic deformations by an electric field.

Keywords Actuators Ferroelectric liquid crystalline elastomers Liquid

crystalline elastomers Miniaturization Photoisomerization