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Updated: Feb 6, 2026

Microfluidic Preparation of Liquid Crystalline Elastomer Actuators
Published on: May 20, 2018
A calamitic mesogenic near-infrared absorbing croconaine dye/liquid crystalline elastomer composite
Ling-Xiang Guo1, Mei-Hua Liu1, Sayed Mir Sayed1
1School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering , Jiangsu Province Hi-Tech Key Laboratory for Bio-medical Research , Jiangsu Optoelectronic Functional Materials and Engineering Laboratory , Southeast University , Nanjing , 211189 , China . Email: yangh@seu.edu.cn ; Tel: +86-25-52090620.
Abstract:
In this work, we report the first example of a calamitic mesogenic near-infrared (NIR) absorbing organic dye, made by functionalizing a thiophene-croconaine chromophore rigid core with two symmetric long flexible alkyl chains. The liquid crystal (LC) NIR dye YHD796 exhibits a sharp and intense NIR absorption band with a maximum absorption peak at 796 nm. Taking advantage of the improved solubility of YHD796 dispersed in mesogenic molecules, a homogeneously-aligned mono-domain liquid crystalline elastomer (LCE)/YHD796 composite film is successfully prepared by applying the classical LC-cell-alignment method and in situ photo-polymerization of photocurable LC monomer mixtures. This LCE/YHD796 composite film performs a fully reversible contraction/expansion response towards NIR light stimulus due to the photo-thermal heating effect induced by the YHD796 dye well-dispersed in the LCE matrix.
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