"Wet-Spun Disulphide LCE Fibres for Continuous Production of Fibrous Artificial Muscles" - Ince, Duffy, Salim (2025)
Alan Duffy
Fantastic work by Joshua Ince and his principal supervisor Dr Nisa Salim on exploring means of producing artifical muscles for a range of needs - from space to medical devices. The artifical muscles (or polymer actuators more scientifically stated) turn signals from electrical to thermal/heating into force across a range of directions. The exact choice of the signal/response can be tuned by the cross linking of the polymers (akin to muscle fibres) and to do this accurately with predictability is a major advantage of fibrous Liquid Crystalline Elastomers (LCEs). Josh did a great job of exploring how to manufacture these LCEs in a continuous production method, creating disulphide crosslinked LCE fibres via the technique of wet spinning.
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