3D Bioplotter Research Papers

Untethered robots, compared with their tethered counterparts, may bring enhanced autonomy. It is highly desirable to engineer multifunctional, lightweight, rapid, and low-voltage driven untethered soft robots that have enhanced adaptability and safer interaction capabilities. Here we present an untethered soft robot by a smart integration of 4D printed liquid crystalline elastomer (LCE) actuators with the associated electronics. The LCE artificial muscle, which consists of a modified LCE sandwiched between a polyimide based heating film and a silicone adhesive, not only has adjustable transition temperatures (39–46 °C) and modulus (0.61–2.57 MPa) but also has decent mechanical properties such as adequate rigidity…

Liquid Crystal Elastomers (LCEs) are renowned for their reversible deformation capabilities. Yet, enhancing their mechanical strength while retaining such flexibility has posed a considerable challenge. To overcome this, we utilized 4D printing to develop an innovative composite of LCE with carbon fiber fabric (LCEC). This approach has notably increased the tensile strength of LCE by eightfold, all the while maintaining its exceptional capacity for reversible deformation. By adjusting the alignment angle between carbon fiber and the LCE printing direction from 0° to 90°, the LCEC demonstrates an array of new deformation patterns, including bending, twisting, wrapping, and S-shaped transformations, which…