Title: 

Rapidly Reversible Organic Crystalline Switch for Conversion of Heat into Mechanical Energy

Year of Publication:

2021

Authors:

Madushani Dharmarwardana, Srimanta Pakhira, Raymond P Welch, Carlos Caicedo-Narvaez, Michael A Luzuriaga, Bhargav S Arimilli, Gregory T McCandless, Babak Fahimi, Jose L Mendoza-Cortes, Jeremiah J Gassensmith

Journal:

Journal of the American Chemical Society

Abstract:

Solid-state thermoelastic behavior—a sudden exertion of an expansive or contractive physical force following a temperature change and phase transition in a solid-state compound—is rare in organic crystals, few are reversible systems, and most of these are limited to a dozen or so cycles before the crystal degrades or they reverse slowly over the course of many minutes or even hours. Comparable to thermosalience, wherein crystal phase changes induce energetic jumping, thermomorphism produces physical work via consistent and near-instantaneous predictable directional force. In this work, we show a fully reversible thermomorphic actuator that is stable at room temperature for multiple years and is capable of actuation for more than 200 cycles at near-ambient temperature. Specifically, the crystals shrink to 90% of their original length instantaneously upon heating beyond 45 °C and expand back to their …

URL:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.1c01549