3D Printed Reversible Shape Changing Components with Stimuli Responsive Materials

By Yiqi Mao, Zhen Ding, Chao Yuan, S. Ai, Michael Isakov, Jiangtao Wu, Tiejun Wang, Martin L. Dunn, H. Jerry Qi. Scientific Reports, 2016

312 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The creation of reversibly-actuating components that alter their shapes in a controllable manner in response to environmental stimuli is a grand challenge in active materials, structures, and robotics. Here we demonstrate a new reversible shape-changing component design concept enabled by 3D printing two stimuli responsive polymers—shape memory polymers and hydrogels—in prescribed 3D architectures. This approach uses the swelling of a hydrogel as the driving force for the shape change, and the temperature-dependent modulus of a shape memory polymer to regulate the time of such shape change. Controlling the temperature and aqueous environment allows switching between two stable configurations – the structures are relatively stiff and can carry load in each – without any mechanical loading and unloading. Specific shape changing scenarios, e.g., based on bending, or twisting in prescribed directions, are enabled via the controlled interplay between the active materials and the 3D printed architectures. The physical phenomena are complex and nonintuitive, and so to help understand the interplay of geometric, material, and environmental stimuli parameters we develop 3D nonlinear finite element models. Finally, we create several 2D and 3D shape changing components that demonstrate the role of key parameters and illustrate the broad application potential of the proposed approach.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/79c60af1a0dcbc00788bb1b4b2bd3c22d82f8f08

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Citations in the corpus

Liquid crystal elastomers: an introduction and review of emerging technologies (2018, background): “The swelling and deswelling properties of hydrogels can be utilized to achieve two-way shape change and controllable motion of soft robots, but their response time is relatively long – especially for large structures as the swelling is based on the time-consuming mass diffusion [141,143,164,165].”
Smart polymers and nanocomposites for 3D and 4D printing (2020, methodology): “by utilizing more than one stimulus, for instance hydration and heating [242], [319], in”
Developments in 4D-printing: a review on current smart materials, technologies, and applications (2019, background): “hydrogels are confined in one direction by stiff materials so that the swelling is anisotropically directed [71].”