Shape Memory Effect Exhibited by Smectic-C Liquid Crystalline Elastomers

Shape memory effect exhibited by smectic-C liquid crystalline elastomers.

It was long expected and recently shown that main-chain liquid crystalline elastomers (MC-LCEs) may serve as high performance soft actuators due to a coupling of their intrinsic characteristics of high, yet labile, ordering and network strain. Here, we present the synthesis of new siloxane-based smectic MC-LCEs. These new materials exhibit a unique thermomechanical behavior known as the shape m...

Soft shape memory in main-chain liquid crystalline elastomers†‡

Dynamics of Liquid Crystalline Elastomers

We developed a full non-local model to nematic elastomers in terms of the displacement and the tensor order parameter. We consider both elastic and nematic contributions. This model allows spatial variation of the order parameter field. We also get the dynamics equation using variation principle applied the Lagrangian and the Rayleigh dissipation function. By using small approximation, we get s...

Applications of Liquid Crystalline Elastomers

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 chang...

Modeling the isotropic/smectic-C tilted lamellar liquid crystalline transition

Extensions of a previously presented Landau-de Gennes type liquid crystalline phase transition model for the direct isotropic/smectic-A (lamellar) a phase transition to the direct isotropic/smectic-C (tilted lamellar) transition are studied. Two different proposed extensions to the model are studied both in the context of ideal ordering (point volume) and full three-dimensional uniaxial scalar/...