International liquid crystal elastomer conference 2019

The International Liquid Crystal Elastomer Conference was this year organised in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The organisers were Danqing Liu, Albert Schenning and Dick Broer from Eindhoven University of Technology. As location they chose the NatLab building in Eindhoven, which was the original building of Philips Research Laboratories, founded in 1914 by Gilles Holst who was the inventor of the low-pressure sodium lamp. It was also the origin of many important new products and technologies such as digital optical data storage (CD, DVD), the magnetics cassette tape and the IC LOCOS technology. But also a few of the earliest reactive mesogens, as basis for the Liquid Crystal Elastomer (LCE) and Network (LCN) technologies, were developed at Philips Research in the mid ‘80ties. Many of these LC molecules were brought on the screen by numerous presenters during the conference. It was the tenth time the ILCEC was organised and the world’s interest in this exiting class of liquid crystals is still growing. The number of participants this year was 120 (Figure 1) with chemists, physicists, engineers and representatives from industry who shared their fundamental advances and discussed their promising application opportunities. Especially meant for newcomers in the field, but also well appreciated by the more senior scientists, the meeting was preceded by a tutorial session, where experienced scientists like Prof. Peter Palffy-Muhoray, Prof. Claudio Zannoni and Prof. Hong Yang addressed the basic principles of the field in a framework of the history of the topics of the conference. In addition, a representative of Wiley, Dr Jos Lenders, explained the optimum conditions to maximise publication successes. The following three days of the conference, introduced by a plenary lecture of Prof. Tomiki Ikeda, there was much emphasis on the mechanical responses of the LCEs and LCNs with sessions on soft robotics, responsive surfaces and actuators (Figure 2). And together with the theoretical support presented in a theory session it demonstrates the very fast developments in this relatively young area with many very promising new approaches initiated from the chemistry and applications coming from engineering, sometime even try to lap frog by allocating Pavlovian behaviour to the polymer networks. Promising for the future of LCEs and LCNs is also the participation of the many young faculty members and students and their active involvement in discussions and contributions to the oral and poster presentations. To be mentioned here is Morgan Barnes from Rice University who won the Best Student Lecture Award for her presentation on Reactive 3D printing of liquid crystal elastomers for non-linear actuation (Figure 3). And the Poster Award winners: Yuanyuan Zhan from Eindhoven University of Technology (second prize),