Photochemical Patterning of Mechanical Stiffness for Versatile Photomechanical Jumps in Liquid Crystal Polymers
발표자
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초록
내용
In nature, jumping allows living animals to rapidly navigate through rough terrains and overcome obstacles often several times their body size. Previously, we newly demonstrated a continuous and directional UV-induced photo-mechanical jumping of polymer monolith by introducing snap-through buckling of super twisted nematic (STN) structured azobenzene functionalized liquid crystal polymer networks (azo-LCNs)[1]. However, the lack of complex sensing components limited the controllability over the jumping directions and modes without the modulation of external factors including light intensity profiles. Herein, we control the modulus mismatch patterns of the azo-LCN monoliths to present multimodal photo-triggered jumps under uniform light. By adopting different photochemical modulations, jumping height, axis, and direction were controlled. Remarkably, a maximum jumping height of 24.5 body length (BL) is reached by patterning mechanical stiffness, which is an 184% increase in height compared to azo-LCNs with uniform modulus.