Nicita Sarah, Weaver James C, Ishii Hiroshi, Forman Jack
Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Sci Rep. 2025 May 15;15(1):16883. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-97835-1.
Textile production methods present a rich set of strategies for developing materials with both form and function encoded at the fiber scale. Beyond simply acting as a static flexible barrier, the ability to incorporate environmentally responsible materials into fabric architectures significantly expands the textile design space by adding on-demand and programmable 3D structural morphing. To this end, liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are a promising candidate for enabling these reversible actuation behaviors in fabric-based constructs. Drawing on traditional textile manufacturing techniques and through a detailed exploration of the vast woven textile design space, we have demonstrated programmable and reversible curling, puffing, and in-plane shrinkage behaviors by embedding the functionality of LCE fibers into single and multi-layered woven structures. Predictable shifts in fabric structure directly influence the mechanical properties and the resulting form factor of the actuated textiles, which can in turn be effectively leveraged for the generation of multi-functional devices, enabling new directions for the engineering of flexible stimuli-responsive materials.
纺织生产方法为开发在纤维尺度上兼具形态和功能的材料提供了一系列丰富的策略。除了简单地作为静态柔性屏障外，将对环境负责的材料融入织物结构的能力，通过增加按需和可编程的3D结构变形，显著扩展了纺织品设计空间。为此，液晶弹性体（LCEs）是在基于织物的结构中实现这些可逆驱动行为的有前途的候选材料。借鉴传统纺织制造技术，并通过对广阔的机织纺织品设计空间进行详细探索，我们通过将LCE纤维的功能嵌入单层和多层机织结构中，展示了可编程和可逆的卷曲、膨化及面内收缩行为。织物结构的可预测变化直接影响驱动纺织品的机械性能和最终的形状因子，进而可有效地用于生成多功能器件，为柔性刺激响应材料的工程设计开辟新方向。
