Near-Infrared Responsive Liquid Crystalline Elastomers Containing Photothermal Conjugated Polymers

In this work, we report the first example of uniaxial aligned conjugated polymer (CP)/liquid crystalline elastomer (LCE) composite material by doping polyaniline nanoparticles into a classical monodomain polysiloxane-based LCE matrix. A series of comparative experiments are performed to investigate the photoresponsive properties of these polyaniline/LCE samples in correspondence to the two different conjugation forms (emeralidine salt (ES) or emeralidine base (EB)) and the varied doping concentrations (0.5 or 1.0 wt %) of the incorporated polyaniline nanoparticles. Taking advantage of the excellent photothermal conversion efficiency, these novel polyaniline/LCE composite materials can lift up ca. 200 times their own weights under the NIR illumination driving force, and such a photostimulated muscle-like actuation behavior is fully reversible after NIR light is removed.