Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have furthered a new type of soft material that can change shape in response to light, a discovery that could advance "soft machines" for a variety of fields, from robotics to medicine.
The novel material called a liquid crystal elastomer (LCE), is made by incorporating liquid crystals into the molecular structure of a stretchable material. Adding gold nanorods to the LCE material, scientists and engineers created photo-responsive inks and 3D-printed structures that could be made to bend, crawl, and move when exposed to a laser that causes localized heating in the material.
As described in their paper published in the journal Matter, the LLNL team, along with their collaborators from Harvard University, North Carolina State University, and the University of Pennsylvania, used a direct ink writing printing technique to build a variety of light-responsive objects, including cylinders that could roll, asymmetric "crawlers" that could go forward and lattice structures that oscillated. By combining shape morphing with photoresponsivity, researchers said the new type of material could change the way people think about machines and materials.
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