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

Meng Wang, Bao-Ping Lin and Hong Yang ()
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Meng Wang: School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Jiangsu Province Hi-Tech Key Laboratory for Bio-medical Research, Jiangsu Optoelectronic Functional Materials and Engineering Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province 211189, China
Bao-Ping Lin: School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Jiangsu Province Hi-Tech Key Laboratory for Bio-medical Research, Jiangsu Optoelectronic Functional Materials and Engineering Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province 211189, China
Hong Yang: School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Jiangsu Province Hi-Tech Key Laboratory for Bio-medical Research, Jiangsu Optoelectronic Functional Materials and Engineering Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province 211189, China

Nature Communications, 2016, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: 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 a plant tendril mimic material capable of performing two different three-dimensional reversible transformations (bending versus chiral twisting) through modulation of the wavelength band of light stimuli (ultraviolet versus near-infrared). This material has broad application prospects in biomimetic control devices.

Date: 2016
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DOI: 10.1038/ncomms13981

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