Light-Powered Liquid Crystal Polymer Network Actuator Using TiO₂ Nanoparticles as an Inorganic Ultraviolet-Light...

Recently, the design and fabrication of light-powered actuators have attracted immense attention because of the manufacturing of intelligent soft robots and innovative self-regulating devices. Accordingly, a liquid crystal polymer network (LCN) provides a promising platform due to its reversible and multistimulus-responsive shape-changing behaviors. In particular, doping nanoparticles with exclusive properties into the LCN can produce interesting results. In this work, we investigated a TiO₂ nanoparticle-based LCN polymer light-powered actuator. TiO₂ nanoparticles as an inorganic ultraviolet (UV)-light absorber can substantially affect the LCN polymer's oscillatory behavior. Our results demonstrate that the oscillation characteristics are directly influenced by the presence of nanoparticles, and we studied the influencing factors. The effectiveness of the elastic modulus, thermomechanical force, and curvature was investigated using different weight percentages of TiO₂ nanoparticles. Our results show that, in the presence of TiO₂ nanoparticles, the polymer chain order and inter-chain interactions in the polymer matrix as well as the structural deformation of relevant polymer surfaces are changed.