Figure 7
Overview of some promising directions for future research on and applications of liquid crystalline CNC suspensions. (A) Alignment by external field application; (a) crossed polarizer image of an aligned fingerprint texture after a vertical magnetic field treatment (ca. 10 T) for ca. 50 h. Reprinted with permission from Kimura et al.80 Copyright (2005) American Chemical Society. (B) Pattern formation in a CNC film produced by maintaining the two halves of the Petri dish at different temperatures during cooling. Reproduced with permission from Beck et al.,61 Copyright (2013) Springer. (C) Enhanced mechanical properties arising from a hierarchical ordering of building blocks arranged in a helical fashion, giving composites the ability to accommodate loadings at different scales, as exemplified by lobster cuticle, which contains the CNC analog chitin in a composite with proteins. Reproduced with permission from Nikolov et al.,22 Copyright © 2010 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim. The characteristic Bouligand arcs (black and white drawing following23), resulting from an oblique cut through the helical structure, can be found in the lobster cuticle as well as in the dried CNCs (right image, reproduced with permission from Terpstra et al.,95 The Royal Society of Chemistry).
