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

Liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) is a typical thermally responsivesoft material, which is an ideal candidate for fabricating programmableshape changing structures. The anisotropic shape changes of LCEs causedby the mesogen reorientation are inherently different from those ofother stimulus-responsive soft materials, such as hydrogels and dielectricelastomers. In this paper, we first investigate the bending behaviorsof bilayer LCEs with monodomain LCEs as the active layer and polydomainLCEs as the passive layer. It is shown that different shape foldingbehaviors can be obtained by changing the aspect ratio. We furtherpropose a strategy to achieve complex activated LCE deformations throughintroducing precuts into the printed LCE structures, which can changethe degrees of freedom of the structures. The shape morphing behaviorsof our design are beyond the ability of the bilayer based on otherstimulus-responsive soft materials. Our method can provide far-reachingpossibilities for soft devices and 3D actuators with various functionalities.