Embedding Intelligence in Materials for Responsive Built Environment: A Topical Review on Liquid Crystal Elastomer Actuators and Sensors

TL;DR

This paper reviews the potential of Liquid Crystal Elastomers (LCEs) for creating autonomous, responsive building systems that can sense and act without external power, enabling innovative, energy-efficient solutions for safety and environmental adaptation.

Contribution

It provides an interdisciplinary overview of how LCEs can be applied in the built environment, highlighting their autonomous capabilities and proposing concrete application scenarios.

Findings

LCEs can enable self-powered, autonomous building functions.

Potential applications include active ventilation and solar tracking.

LCEs can improve safety and environmental responsiveness in buildings.

Abstract

Liquid Crystal Elastomers (LCEs) are an exciting category of material that has tremendous application potential across a variety of fields, owing to their unique properties that enable both sensing and actuation. To some, LCEs are simply another type of Shape Memory Polymer, while to others they are an interesting on-going scientific experiment. In this visionary article, we bring an interdisciplinary discussion around creative and impactful ways that LCEs can be applied in the Built Environment to support kinematic and kinetic buildings and situational awareness. We focus particularly on the autonomy made possible by using LCEs, potentially removing needs for motors, wiring and tubing, and even enabling fully independent operation in response to natural environment variations, requiring no power sources. To illustrate the potential, we propose a number of concrete application scenarios where LCEs could offer innovative solutions to problems of great societal importance, such as autonomous active ventilation, heliotropic solar panel systems which can also remove snow or sand autonomously, and invisible coatings with strain mapping functionality, alerting residents in case of dangerous (static or dynamic) loads on roofs or windows, as well as assisting building safety inspection teams after earthquakes.