Active twisting for adaptive droplet collection.

Abstract

Many xeric plant leaves exhibit bending and twisting morphology, which may contribute to their important biological and physical functions adapted to drought and desert conditions. Revealing the relationships between various morphologies and functionalities can inspire device designs for meeting increasingly stringent environmental requirements. Here, demonstrated on the biomimetic bilayer ribbons made of liquid crystal elastomers, we reveal that the stimulus-induced morphological evolution of bending, spiraling, twisting and various coupling states among them can be selectively achieved and precisely tuned by designing the director orientations in liquid crystal elastomer bilayers. The mathematical models and analytical solutions are developed to quantify the morphology selection and phase transition of these liquid crystal elastomer ribbons for material design, as confirmed by experiments. Moreover, we show that, under activation and control of external stimuli, the twisting configuration can be harnessed to effectively collect and guide the transportation of droplets, and enhance the structural stiffness for resisting wind blow and rainfall to achieve the optimal configuration for water collection. Our results reveal the interesting functions correlated with bending, spiraling and twisting morphologies widely present in the natural world, by providing fundamental insights into their shape transformation and controlling factors. This work also demonstrates a potential application with integrating morphogenesis-environment interactions into devices or equipments.