Liquid Crystals Find New Orders in Soft Robotics
Apr 11, 2025
2:30PM to 3:30PM
Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/04/2025
2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
Categories
Prof. Hamed Shahsavan
Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Waterloo
Soft robotics is a multidisciplinary field that links different research fields, such as chemistry, materials science, mechanical engineering, instrumentation and control, and artificial intelligence. During the last decade, the development of novel materials and fabrication techniques have been two of the major challenges for further progress in soft robotics. Soft materials with programmable integrated sensing and actuating capabilities that can be scaled down (or up) by various fabrication techniques are highly desirable for the fabrication of soft robots with a reduced number, size, and weight of components. In this seminar, I will talk about the importance of liquid crystalline materials in the design and fabrication of soft robots and their components. I will present our recent progress in the development of artificial muscles and robotic constructs from LC materials that can be remotely stimulated by a variety of cues, such as heat, light, and electrical fields, at different scales and media. I will also present opportunities to create novel solutions or augment the existing capabilities of microscale robotic systems with an emphasis on their future biomedical applications.
Speaker bio:
Hamed Shahsavan is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He obtained his PhD in chemical engineering and nanotechnology from the University of Waterloo in 2017. In his graduate studies, Dr. Shahsavan’s research was focused on the fabrication and characterization of bioinspired micro/nanostructured surfaces and their implications in fundamental studies of contact mechanics, and interfacial phenomena, such as adhesion, friction, and wetting. Fascinated by the rapidly growing fields of soft robotics and smart materials, he moved to Stuttgart in Germany, to embark on his postdoctoral research as an NSERC postdoctoral fellow at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. In this period, he mainly focused on the synthesis of different types of liquid crystalline elastomers, networks, and gels to deploy them as shape-change programmable materials in soft robots and devices at millimeter to micrometer scale. During his PhD studies, Dr. Shahsavan was a visiting scholar at the Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University, OH, USA. He was also a visiting scientist in the Smart Photonic Materials (SPM) research group at the University of Tampere in Finland. His current research interests revolve around developing a variety of soft, stimuli-responsive, and programmable materials, and different fabrication methods for manufacturing small-scale mobile robots and devices.
In-Person: ABB 102
Online: https://mcmaster.zoom.us/j/93799023207
Meeting ID: 937 9902 3207
Passcode: 774841