Programming the geometries and the director fields of LCEs have thus been studied and utilized as an effective approach to design the shape-morphing behavior of LCEs. Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) exhibit programmable complex shape transformations, depending on both the programmed geometries and molecular orientations (i.e., the director fields) 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.
Programmable shape-morphing of stimuli-responsive materials is vital for the functionalities of smart material-based devices in various applications, such as robot locomotion 1, 2, 3, targeted drug delivery 4, 5, 6, and tunable surface wettability 7, 8, 9. In this way, the orientation of the director fields can be made to vary at voxel resolution to allow for programmable optically- or thermally-triggered anisotropic or heterogeneous material responses and morphology changes in three dimensions that would be impossible or hard to implement otherwise. Second, these voxels are in turn assembled to form lines, grids, or skeletal structures that would be rather difficult to obtain from an initially connected material sample. First, we create independent, cubic light-responsive voxels, each with a predefined director field orientation. Here we generalize this idea in two steps. In two dimensions, a pixel-by-pixel design has been accomplished to attain more flexibility over the spatial resolution of the liquid crystal response. The morphing modes of these materials depend on both their geometries and director fields. Liquid crystal elastomers exhibit large reversible strain and programmable shape transformations, enabling various applications in soft robotics, dynamic optics, and programmable origami and kirigami.
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