Photomobile Liquid-Crystalline Elastomers with Rearrangeable Networks

Toru Ube; Kyohei Kawasaki; Tomiki Ikeda

doi:10.1002/adma.201602745

Photomobile Liquid-Crystalline Elastomers with Rearrangeable Networks

Adv Mater. 2016 Oct;28(37):8212-8217. doi: 10.1002/adma.201602745. Epub 2016 Jul 15.

Authors

Toru Ube¹, Kyohei Kawasaki¹, Tomiki Ikeda^{2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Research and Development Initiative, Chuo University, 1-13-27 Kasuga, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 112-8551, Japan.
² Research and Development Initiative, Chuo University, 1-13-27 Kasuga, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 112-8551, Japan. tikeda@tamacc.chuo-u.ac.jp.
³ Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 29 Zhongguancun East Road, Beijing, 100190, China. tikeda@tamacc.chuo-u.ac.jp.

PMID: 27418031
DOI: 10.1002/adma.201602745

Abstract

Incorporation of dynamic covalent bonds into photomobile liquid-crystalline elastomers with a polysiloxane backbone enables the alignment of mesogens and macroscopic shapes to be controlled through the rearrangement of the network topology, even after the formation of chemically crosslinked networks. The reshaped samples show various sophisticated 3D motions upon irradiation with UV and visible light, depending on their initial shapes.

Keywords: azobenzene; dynamic covalent bonds; liquid-crystalline polymers; photomechanical effect; soft actuators.