Nematic elastomers with aligned carbon nanotubes: New electromechanical actuators
By S. Courty, J. Mine, A. R. Tajbakhsh, Eugene M. Terentjev. 2003
184 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We demonstrate, for the first time, the large electromechanical response in nematic liquid-crystalline elastomers filled with a very low ( ~ 0.01%) concentration of carbon nanotubes, aligned along the nematic director at preparation. The nanotubes create a very large effective dielectric anisotropy of the composite. Their local field-induced torque is transmitted to the rubber elastic network and is registered as the exerted uniaxial stress of order ~ 1 kPa in response to a constant field of order ~ 1 MV/m. We investigate the dependence of the effect on field strength, nanotube concentration and reproducibility under multiple field-on and -off cycles. The results indicate the potential of the nanotube-nematic elastomer composites as electrically driven actuators.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f40303c7b18cd063c156c98c83a8d8f59236867d
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In Biomedical Engineering
In Mechanical Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Review of Applications of Polymer/Carbon Nanotubes and Epoxy/CNT Composites (2016, background): “Courty et al.[31] reported that a new activator response Table 2.”
- Liquid-crystal materials find a new order in biomedical applications. (2007, background): “Doping liquid-crystal elastomers with carbon materials generates even larger electric field effects in these material”
- Polymers with aligned carbon nanotubes: Active composite materials (2008, background): “In fact, there is good evidence that a very good nanotube alignment can be achieved if dispersed in a monodomain liquid crystal elastomer during processing – the mesogenic moieties act to align the tubes [61].”