Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are attractive materials for energy dissipation, due to their extreme damping behavior emerging from an internal degree of freedom of LC molecules, which is coupled to elastic deformations of the polymer network. Here, we report architected materials composed of LCE beams for extreme energy absorption. We have synthesized LCEs through a two-stage thiol‚Äìacrylate reaction to consider the effects of the alignment of LC molecules within LCE beam elements. The energy-absorbing capability of metamaterials consisting of bistable beams with differently arranged LC molecules is characterized at strain rates from 10^-4 /s to 10^3 /s and it followed a power-law relation. We observed that architected materials based on LCE showed an increase in energy absorption at a higher strain rate. Moreover, the strain-rate dependency could be tuned by LCEs with different degrees of alignment. We envision that our study can contribute to harnessing the interplay between snapping-based architectures and enhanced dissipation of LCEs to enable the architected materials with extreme energy absorbing capabilities.	  

Extreme Energy Absorbing Architected Materials Based on Liquid Crystal Elastomers

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