Blueprinting Nematic Glass: Systematically Constructing and Combining Active Points of Curvature for Emergent Morphology

TL;DR

This paper introduces a systematic method for designing nematic glass textures that can be combined to create complex 3D shapes from flat sheets, advancing the control of shape morphing in nematic materials.

Contribution

It presents a new approach to construct and combine simple nematic textures for programmable shape transformation, expanding the toolkit for shape blueprinting in nematic glasses.

Findings

Constructed textures are compatible and can be combined to form complex shapes.

Deformation properties of these textures enable precise shape control.

Method allows for the design of 3D structures from flat nematic sheets.

Abstract

Much recent progress has been made in the study of nematic solids, both glassy and elastomeric, particularly in the realm of stress-free, defect-driven deformation in thin sheets of material. In this paper we consider a subset of texture domains in nematic glasses that are simple to synthesize, and explore the ways that these simple domains may be compatibly combined to yield analogs of the traditional smooth disclination defect textures seen in standard liquid crystals. We calculate the deformation properties of these constructed textures, and show that, subject to the compatibility constraints of the construction, these textures may be further combined to achieve shape blueprinting of 3-D structures from flat sheets.