A plant tendril mimic soft actuator with phototunable bending and chiral twisting motion modes.

ABSTRACT: In nature, plant tendrils can produce two fundamental motion modes, bending and chiral twisting (helical curling) distortions, under the stimuli of sunlight, humidity, wetting or other atmospheric conditions. To date, many artificial plant-like mechanical machines have been developed. Although some previously reported materials could realize bending or chiral twisting through tailoring the samples into various ribbons along different orientations, each single ribbon could execute only one deformation mode. The challenging task is how to endow one individual plant tendril mimic material with two different, fully tunable and reversible motion modes (bending and chiral twisting). Here we show a dual-layer, dual-composition polysiloxane-based liquid crystal soft actuator strategy to synthesize

SUBMITTER: Wang M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5192217 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature