Breaking through 40 years of technical bottlenecks, new artificial muscle materials have been successfully developed

Artificial muscle is a new type of intelligent shape memory material that can be stretched, bent, clamped or expanded by changing the internal structure of the materialAt present, commonly used artificial muscle materials are piezoelectric ceramics, shape memory alloys, electroactive polymers and so onRecently, the reporter learned from Southeast University, the university's Institute of Chemical and Chemical Engineering Professor Yang Hong team developed a polyurethane / polyacrylate mutual wear network structure liquid crystal elastomer material, which has super mechanical properties, broke through 40 years of research bottlenecks, in the field of artificial muscles and other fields have a wide range of applicationsThe findings were published recently in the international journal Proceedings of the American Chemical Societyliquid crystal elastomer is a typical two-way shape memory material, with the advantages of larger shape, deformation and other technology, in bionic devices, soft robots and other fields have a good application prospectsHowever, after 40 years of development, liquid crystal elastomer research is still at the laboratory level, not industrialization applicationYang Hong, said liquid crystal elastomers were developed 40 years ago, 20 years ago, people realized that it can be used as a high-quality material for artificial muscles"Liquid crystal elastomer as the best two-way shape memory material, large shape variables, can be compressed from 100 cm to 20 cm, shape change speed is also fast, which is more than piezoelectric ceramics and other materialsbut the key scientific problem that restricts its application is that the stress produced by liquid crystal elastomers in the deformation process is too small to meet the mechanical performance requirements of the practical application scenarioYang Hong said: "An important index affecting stress size is the size of elastic modulus, the current research at home and abroad liquid crystal elastomer deformation elastic mode is only a few megapa, if you want to use artificial muscle, at least 10 megapa." Professor Yang Hong's research team,, took a different approach, using the small molecular precursor component syllone components of polyurethane liquid crystal elastomer and polyacrylic liquid crystal hot solids, and then synchronous crosslinking technique, to prepare a polyurethane / polyacrylate mutual Through the network structure liquid crystal elastomer material, its shrinkage strain, stress, elastic mode reached 46%, 2.53 MPa, 10.4 MPa, for the first time fully meet the mechanical performance requirements of liquid crystal elastomer-based artificial muscles, breaking through the technical bottleneck in this field(Golden Phoenix)