Active‐Textile Yarns and Embroidery Enabled by Wet‐Spun Liquid Crystalline Elastomer Filaments

Abstract

Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are promising candidates for creating adaptive textile‐based devices that can actively and reversibly respond to the environment for sensing and communication. Despite recent advances in scalable manufacturing of LCE filaments for textile engineering, the actuation modes of various LCE filaments focus on contractual deformations. In this study, manufacture of polydomain LCE filaments with potential scalability by wet‐spinning is studied, followed by mechanical exploitation to program liquid crystal mesogen alignments, demonstrating both contractual and twisting actuation profiles. By plying these LCE filaments into yarns with different twist concentrations, yarn actuation, and mechanical performance is tuned. Yarns plied at 4 twists per cm can generate up to a seven‐fold increase in elastic modulus while maintaining 90% of actuation strain performance from their native filament. The contractual and twisting LCE filaments are then embroidered with varying stitch types to spatially program complex 2D‐to‐3D transformations in “inactive” fabrics. It is shown that a running stitch can actuate up to 15% in strain and create angular displacements in fabric with twisted mesogen alignments. It is envisioned that the wet‐spun polydomain LCE filaments for diverse plied yarn production together with textile engineering will open new opportunities to design smart textiles and soft robotics.