A team led by Associate Professor Wang Li from the School of Mechanical Engineering at Xi'an Jiaotong University has developed a 3D printing technology using molten electrofluid, capable of producing soft actuators for liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) ranging from micrometer to centimeter scales. Researchers have fabricated various macro-micro cross-scale structured soft actuators responsive to thermal stimuli, and for the first time, applied LCE materials in the field of temperature field detection, developing an environment temperature field sensor integrating machine vision with deep learning models. This research achievement was recently published in Science Advances.
The molten electrofluid 3D printing technology forms cone jets by applying a direct current high-voltage electric field at the end of a metal needle and deposits them onto a substrate. Combining the three-axis movement of the substrate with layer-by-layer stacking of jets forms macro-micro cross-scale structures, enabling precise deposition of LCE microfibers of different diameters along specified paths, thereby realizing unit microstructures with thermal strain performance. In this study, a chip inductor with a load exceeding 33 times the weight of the micro gripper was used to test its grasping ability. Results demonstrate that the printed micro gripper can easily grasp/release microsensor devices under cyclic heating/cooling stimuli.
High-precision manufacturing of programmable liquid crystal elastomer three-dimensional microstructures has always been a challenge, and molten electrofluid 3D printing technology provides a low-cost, large-scale, high-resolution manufacturing process for this purpose.
The creation of macro-to-microscale structures via 3D printing of liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) using molten current flow. (Image courtesy of the research team)
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