Issue 10, 2019
From the journal:

Chemical Science

Durable liquid-crystalline vitrimer actuators†

Qiaomei Chen, ORCID logo a   Yongsan Li,a   Yang Yang, ORCID logo a   Yanshuang Xu,b   Xiaojie Qian,a   Yen Weiac  and  Yan Ji*a  

* Corresponding authors

a MOE Key Laboratory of Bioorganic Phosphorus Chemistry & Chemical Biology, Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
E-mail: jiyan@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn

b Guangxi Key Laboratory of Petrochemical Resource Processing and Process Intensification Technology, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China

c Department of Chemistry, Center for Nanotechnology and Institute of Biomedical Technology, Chung-Yuan Christian University, Chung-Li 32023, Taiwan

Abstract

Vitrimer-based liquid-crystalline elastomers (LCEs) exhibit great advantages over the traditional LCEs due to their inherent processability to realize monodomain alignment and construction of LCE actuators with complex 3D structures in a robust way. Though exciting progress has been made, how to achieve a proper balance between processability and actuation durability/stability remains a big challenge. Here, we report a strategy to mitigate the conflict between processability and actuation stability by reducing the catalyst content in an epoxy/acid LCE vitrimer system. With a relatively low catalyst content (0.25 mol% to carboxyl group), monodomain LCEs with large actuation strain (∼95%) and excellent actuation stability (the actuation strain is completely maintained after 100 heating–cooling cycles and more than 90% of the initial strain is retained even after 500 cycles) could be easily prepared. Moreover, the monodomain LCEs can still be readily realigned or directly reconfigured into complex reversible 3D actuators.

Graphical abstract: Durable liquid-crystalline vitrimer actuators

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Article information

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1039/C8SC05358H
Article type
Edge Article
Submitted
30 Nov 2018
Accepted
22 Jan 2019
First published
23 Jan 2019
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Chem. Sci., 2019,10, 3025-3030

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Durable liquid-crystalline vitrimer actuators

Q. Chen, Y. Li, Y. Yang, Y. Xu, X. Qian, Y. Wei and Y. Ji, Chem. Sci., 2019, 10, 3025 DOI: 10.1039/C8SC05358H

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