Wet-Spun Disulphide LCE Fibres for Continuous Production of Fibrous Artificial Muscles

Liquid Crystalline Elastomers (LCEs) are a class of shape-changing polymers with exceptional mechanical properties and potential as artificial muscles/polymer actuators. Much work has been dedicated to expanding the methods available for processing LCEs into various forms using different manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing, film casting, and microfluidic processing. Recently, several works have reported processing LCEs into long fibres and have highlighted the advantages that fibrous LCEs boast over LCE films. However, the development of alternative methods to produce fibrous LCEs is warranted to fully expedite this field of research. In this study, a method for continuous production of disulphide crosslinked LCE fibres via the technique of wet spinning is explored and reported on. Furthermore, the results show that the mechanical properties, actuation force, and actuation strain can be tuned by adjusting how much crosslinker is incorporated into the wet-spinning dope solution. Depending on the given formulation, the reported fibres could repeatedly actuate in response to thermal energy with actuation forces ranging from 0.002 to 0.02 N per fibre and actuation strains ranging from 9.7 to 33%.