Bioinspired Construction of Artificial Cardiac Muscles Based on Liquid Crystal Elastomer Fibers

Abstract

Human muscles, including skeletal, smooth, and cardiac muscles, are able to perform diverse deformations and execute complex biofunctions stimulated by nerve signals. Similarly, liquid crystal elastomer (LCE), which can respond to external stimuli with large and reversible deformations, demonstrates superior advantages to mimic nature muscles to fabricate artificial muscles. Till now, LCE has been utilized to simulate deformations and related functions of skeletal and smooth muscles. However, limited by the existing fabrication strategy, employing LCE to mimic the motion of cardiac muscles and further realizing the structure‐determined pumping functions, is still an open challenge. Learning from the specific spatial arrangements and synergistic actuation of cardiac muscle fibers within human heart, a simple and general strategy to construct artificial cardiac muscles with LCE fibers is proposed. In this work, LCE fibers with similar modulus and actuation behavior to muscle fibers are fabricated and spatially arranged in biological architectures as cardiac muscle fibers. As a result, artificial cardiac muscles are constructed and are able to perform simultaneous contraction and torsion motions, realizing heart‐pumping functions. This general strategy should be also applicable for other smart materials to conduct challenging tasks.

Sustainable Macromolecular Materials in Flexible Electronics

“…Composites with biocompatible materials and materials mimicking organ functions can already be produced. [58,59] Particular emphasis on actuators is foreseen in the field of soft robotics.…”

Thermally Driven Self-Rotation of a Hollow Torus Motor

“…In recent years, based on various stimuli-responsive materials including thermally responsive polymer materials [ 26 , 27 ], liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) [ 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 ], dielectric elastomer [ 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ], hydrogels [ 36 , 37 ], and ion gels [ 38 , 39 ], a wealth of self-excited motion modes have been proposed, such as rolling [ 40 , 41 ], vibration [ 24 , 31 , 40 , 41 ], torsion [ 41 , 42 ], stretching and shrinking [ 10 , 40 , 43 ], swinging [ 44 ], buckling [ 45 , 46 ], jumping [ 47 , 48 , 49 ], rotation [ 25 , 28 ], eversion or inversion [ 27 , 50 ], expansion and contraction [ 51 , 52 ], swimming [ 53 ] and even group behavior of several coupled self-excited oscillators [ 54 ]. The self-oscillating system is usually accompanied with damping dissipation, and its motion is a non-equilibrium dissipation process.…”

Multisensory Flexible Braille Interactive Device Based on Liquid Crystal Elastomers

“…In addition to traditional structural designs such as miniature flexible actuators 2,4,10−13 or soft robots, 3,14−18 there have been reports of conceptual ideas in the study of LCEs interacting with biological tissues for their excellent biosafety, such as spinal implants, tunable iris, 19 intravascular stents, 20 and tissue-assisted contraction. 21 This paper proposes a flexible braille device with multisensory interactive based on LCEs (Figure 1), which solves the problems of the complexity of the mechanical structure, poor durability, and inability to curl and carry in traditional braille devices. It can realize the braille input and output by accurately distinguishing and integrating the fabrication of the fixed-point stretchable convex lattice and the part of the substrate on a piece of LCE film, combined with the good electrical heating properties of the ultrathin conductive nanocoating and reasonable circuit design.…”