Shape Morphing of 3D Printed Liquid Crystal Elastomer Structures with Precuts

Liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) is a typical thermally responsive soft material, which is an ideal candidate for fabricating programmable shape changing structures. The anisotropic shape changes of LCEs caused by the mesogen reorientation are inherently different from those of other stimulus-responsive soft materials, such as hydrogels and dielectric elastomers. In this paper, we first investigate the bending behaviors of bilayer LCEs with monodomain LCEs as the active layer and polydomain LCEs as the passive layer. It is shown that different shape folding behaviors can be obtained by changing the aspect ratio. We further propose a strategy to achieve complex activated LCE deformations through introducing precuts into the printed LCE structures, which can change the degrees of freedom of the structures. The shape morphing behaviors of our design are beyond the ability of the bilayer based on other stimulus-responsive soft materials. Our method can provide far-reaching possibilities for soft devices and 3D actuators with various functionalities.