A Multiphysics Study on Light-responsive Nematic Liquid Crystalline Elastomer

Abstract

This dissertation investigated light-responsive nematic liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) through a continuous progression from polymer-chain statistics to constitutive modeling, material characterization, finite-element analysis, and device-level assessment. The nematic LCEs can spontaneously deform under certain external stimuli via the shift in the order of LC mesogen alignment, which, in analogy to the pure liquid crystals, is the so-called nematic-isotropic (N-I) phase transition. The overall objective was to establish a physically interpretable and computationally applicable framework for predicting the coupled optical, thermal, mechanical, and nematic responses of light-responsive LCEs, while also examining the extent to which their material-level actuation can be translated into useful device-level performance.