Shell-Forming Stimulus-Active Hydrogel Composite Membranes: Concept and Modeling

The swelling of active hydrogels combined with passive layers allows the design of shell-forming structures. A shell-like structure offers different properties than a flat structure, e.g., variations in bending stiffness across different directions. A drastic increase of the bending stiffness is fav...

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Autores principales: Ehrenhofer, Adrian, Wallmersperger, Thomas
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7345794/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32466594
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi11060541
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author Ehrenhofer, Adrian
Wallmersperger, Thomas
author_facet Ehrenhofer, Adrian
Wallmersperger, Thomas
author_sort Ehrenhofer, Adrian
collection PubMed
description The swelling of active hydrogels combined with passive layers allows the design of shell-forming structures. A shell-like structure offers different properties than a flat structure, e.g., variations in bending stiffness across different directions. A drastic increase of the bending stiffness is favorable e.g., in rollable/flexible displays: in their unrolled form, they have to be stiff enough to resist bending due to dead weight. At the same time, they have to be flexible enough to be rolled-up. This can be achieved by shell-forming. In the current modeling and simulation work, we present a basic concept of combined active–passive composites and demonstrate how they form shells. As the example material class, we use hydrogels with isotropic swelling capabilities. We demonstrate how to model the combined mechanical behavior with the Temperature-Expansion-Model. Afterwards, we show numerical results obtained by Finite Element simulations. We conclude that the envisioned structure has a great potential for obtaining soft rollable sheets that can be stiffened by intrinsic activation.
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spelling pubmed-73457942020-07-09 Shell-Forming Stimulus-Active Hydrogel Composite Membranes: Concept and Modeling Ehrenhofer, Adrian Wallmersperger, Thomas Micromachines (Basel) Article The swelling of active hydrogels combined with passive layers allows the design of shell-forming structures. A shell-like structure offers different properties than a flat structure, e.g., variations in bending stiffness across different directions. A drastic increase of the bending stiffness is favorable e.g., in rollable/flexible displays: in their unrolled form, they have to be stiff enough to resist bending due to dead weight. At the same time, they have to be flexible enough to be rolled-up. This can be achieved by shell-forming. In the current modeling and simulation work, we present a basic concept of combined active–passive composites and demonstrate how they form shells. As the example material class, we use hydrogels with isotropic swelling capabilities. We demonstrate how to model the combined mechanical behavior with the Temperature-Expansion-Model. Afterwards, we show numerical results obtained by Finite Element simulations. We conclude that the envisioned structure has a great potential for obtaining soft rollable sheets that can be stiffened by intrinsic activation. MDPI 2020-05-26 /pmc/articles/PMC7345794/ /pubmed/32466594 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi11060541 Text en © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Ehrenhofer, Adrian
Wallmersperger, Thomas
Shell-Forming Stimulus-Active Hydrogel Composite Membranes: Concept and Modeling
title Shell-Forming Stimulus-Active Hydrogel Composite Membranes: Concept and Modeling
title_full Shell-Forming Stimulus-Active Hydrogel Composite Membranes: Concept and Modeling
title_fullStr Shell-Forming Stimulus-Active Hydrogel Composite Membranes: Concept and Modeling
title_full_unstemmed Shell-Forming Stimulus-Active Hydrogel Composite Membranes: Concept and Modeling
title_short Shell-Forming Stimulus-Active Hydrogel Composite Membranes: Concept and Modeling
title_sort shell-forming stimulus-active hydrogel composite membranes: concept and modeling
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7345794/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32466594
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi11060541
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