Electrostatic Actuation of a Liquid Crystal Elastomer with Three-Dimensional Electric Field Modulation

Liquid crystal elastomers (LCE) have gained enormous attention in the recent past because of their facile fabrication and reversible shape morphing when exposed to external stimuli such as heat, light humidity, and magnetic or electric force. Especially among these, the electrostatic force has several advantages including fast response, easy control, and low power consumption. Mostly, Maxwell's stresses have been employed to control the shape morphing of LCE, but electrode patterning is limited. Therefore, we propose a new type of stimuli to control the LCE based on electrostatic forces generated because of charge transfer between electrodes and LCE. As a result, we demonstrated various types of operations with a high degree of freedom by applying electrostatic forces. The above result could be achieved through three-dimensional control of the electric field according to the structure of the electrode and the application signal without a pre-program in the LCE samples. We believe this study will be very useful for developing LCE-based actuators for various operations using electrostatic control methods with a variety of electrode designs and field modulation.