Related papers: Actuation of cylindrical nematic elastomer balloon…
Liquid crystal elastomers contract along their director on heating and recover on cooling, offering great potential as actuators and artificial muscles. If a flat sheet is programmed with a spatially varying director pattern, it will…
A body immersed in a nematic liquid crystal disturbs the fluid's preferred molecular configuration and increases its stored elastic energy. In an active nematic, the fluid components also generate a stress in the bulk fluid. By introducing…
Soft robotics is advancing the use of flexible materials for adaptable robotic systems. Membrane-actuated soft robots address the limitations of traditional soft robots by using pressurized, extensible membranes to achieve stable, large…
Liquid crystal elastomers are rubber-like solids with liquid crystalline mesogens (stiff, rod-like molecules) incorporated either into the main chain or as a side chain of the polymer. These solids display a range of unusual…
Active nematics are microscopically driven liquid crystals that exhibit dynamical steady states characterized by the creation and annihilation of topological defects. Motivated by experimental realizations of such systems made of biopolymer…
Dynamic buckling is addressed for complete elastic spherical shells subject to a rapidly applied step in external pressure. Insights from the perspective of nonlinear dynamics reveal essential mathematical features of the buckling…
Nematic polymeric networks are (heat and light) activable materials, which combine the features of rubber and nematic liquid crystals. When only the stretching energy of a thin sheet of nematic polymeric network is minimized, the intrinsic…
Liquid crystal elastomers realize a fascinating new form of soft matter that is a composite of a conventional crosslinked polymer gel (rubber) and a liquid crystal. These {\em solid} liquid crystal amalgams, quite similarly to their…
Soft matter systems are common in nature and make up nearly all the essential components necessary for life, from cells to the organelles within those cells. The ability of these soft materials to deform is crucial for the proper…
Photoactive nematic elastomers are soft rubbery solids that undergo deformation when illuminated. They are made by incorporating photoactive molecules like azobenzene into nematic liquid crystal elastomers. Since its initial demonstration…
Wrinkles commonly develop in a thin film deposited on a soft elastomer substrate when the film is subject to compression. Motivated by recent experiments [Agrawal et al., Soft Matter 8, 7138 (2012)] that show how wrinkle morphology can be…
I put forward a continuum theory for active nematic gels, defined as fluids or suspensions of orientable rodlike objects endowed with active dynamics, that is based on symmetry arguments and compatibility with thermodynamics. The starting…
Stability is an important and fruitful avenue of research for liquid crystal elastomers. At constant temperature, upon stretching, the homogeneous state of a nematic body becomes unstable, and alternating shear stripes develop at very low…
We describe a fluidic actuator design that replaces the sealed chamber of a hydraulic cylinder using a soft actuator to provide compliant linear compression with a large force ($\geq$100 N) at a low operation pressure ($\leq$50 kPa) for a…
Amorphous silica deforms viscoplastically at elevated temperatures, as is common for brittle glasses. The key mechanism of viscoplastic deformation involves interatomic bond switching, which is known to be a thermally activated process. In…
Magnetic-responsive composites that consist of soft matrix embedded with hard-magnetic particles have recently been demonstrated as robust soft active materials for fast-transforming actuation. However, the deformation of the functional…
In liquid-crystalline elastomers, the nematic order parameter and the induced strain vary smoothly across the isotropic-nematic transition, without the expected first-order discontinuity. To investigate this smooth variation, we measure the…
The recent discovery of electro-active polymers has shown great promises in the field of soft robotics, and was logically followed by experimental, numerical and theoretical developments. Most of these studies were concerned with systems…
Materials exhibiting a large caloric effect could lead to the development of new generation of heat-management technologies that will have better energy efficiency and be potentially more environmentally friendly. The focus of caloric…
Active materials are capable of converting free energy into directional motion, giving rise to striking dynamical phenomena. Developing a general understanding of their structure in relation to the underlying non-equilibrium physics would…