Fig. 10: Direct ink writing of LCE material.
a The extrusion method can be applied in additive manufacturing to deposit and cure aligned LCE fibers in layers, producing 3D specimens of elaborate shapes with an in-plane aligned and patterned mesogen alignment. b Out-of-plane actuations are attained by patterning the deposition in a spiral-like fashion. Scale bars: 5 mm. Reproduced with permission from ref. 95. © 2018 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim. Bending actuations are achieved by introducing additional mechanical gradients over the printed LCE’s thickness. Examples demonstrate varying the mesogenic order over the deposited material’s thickness with a temperature gradient (c, Reproduced with permission from ref. 99. Copyright © 2019 American Chemical Society.) or varying the printing speed to induce mismatching strains between the deposited layers (d, Reproduced with permission from ref. 93. Copyright © 2020 American Chemical Society.). e Printable free-standing LCE material enables hybrid printing of programmed LCE fibers in-between rigid components. Scale bars: 10 mm. Reproduced from ref. 103. © 2022 Wiley-VCH GmbH. f A multimaterial printing process is developed to fabricate LCEs with surface-deposited conductive traces for joule heating. Reproduced from ref. 106. Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by American Chemical Society.
