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The present work investigates the thermally controlled deformation characteristics in temperature-sensitive hydrogels bilayers. The free energy density for temperature-sensitive hydrogels is modified, upon which the finite element model is developed and implemented through user-defined material subroutine UHYPER in the commercial software ABAQUS. The modified UHYPER implementation allows for more vividly depicting the continuous deformation in phase temperature region for temperature-sensitive hydrogels. Several thermally controlled cases of temperature-sensitive hydrogel including grippers, self-folding boxes, thermally driven origami are presented to illustrate a wide array of complex interesting applications or phenomena. Furthermore, we develop a simple model to theoretically calculate the bending angle of the temperature-sensitive hydrogel bilayers, which has been validated by the finite element simulation results. Our study can provide more insights for optimal design in thermally controlled hydrogels structures.
Hu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.