Generation of Liquid Crystal Elastomer Fibers via a Wet Spinning Technology with Two-Stage Crosslinking

Liquid crystal elastomers (LCE) are a promising material to achieve reversible actuation while being able to perform work, showing great potential as artificial muscles in soft robotics and medical technology. Here, a wet spinning process to prepare liquid crystal elastomer fibers (LCEF) with reversible actuation capability is presented. Furthermore, we demonstrate the ability to process side-chain liquid crystal (LC) 4-Methoxyphenyl 4-(3-butenyloxy)benzoate (MBB) into a fiber, enlarging the material variance available in this field. The wet spinning process is presented and discussed in terms of spinning parameters and their influence on fiber properties, especially LC orientation. Moderate draw ratios of up to 2.3 enable highly oriented mesogens (f = 0.64), enabling the contractile behavior. The generated MBB-based LCEF show low activation temperature (54.52 °C), temperature-dependent mechanical properties, reversible contraction behavior while lifting up to 140 times their own weight and are able to perform work of up to 3.857 J kg⁻¹. Actuation properties are compared with human skeletal muscle, and possible strategies of further enhancing the LCEF performance are discussed. The generated data show promising features of the LCEF for use as artificial muscle fibers in medical applications, e.g., prosthetics and artificial cardiac tissue.