ABSTRACT
Sensitivity and adaptability to the changing environment is one of most important features of advanced materials being developed in modern material science. Temperature change is one of the most common environmental phenomena. It relates to various aspects of our daily life. Various thermo-responsive materials have been developed to sense, detect, and utilize this change for improving our life; for example, fl uids with thermo-induced volume expending/color shift are used to fabricate thermometer for recording temperature; bilayer structures made from metals with different expansion coeffi cients can bend with increasing temperature so provide a warming mechanism for fi re accident, etc. Among these interesting thermo-responsive systems, thermo-responsive soft matters are attracting more and more attention due to their applications in wide range fi elds including drug delivery (Calejo et al. 2013, Matanovic et al. 2014, Schmaljohann 2006), seawater desalination (Zhao et al. 2013), passive cooling of building (Rotzetter et al. 2012), smart medical devices (Behl et al. 2010, Ratna and Karger-Kocsis 2008, Sokolowski et al. 2007), soft robots (Buguin et al. 2006, Yang et al. 2011), surgeries (Fujiwara 2012, Muramatsu et al. 2012, Strotmann et al. 2011), sensors (Islam et al. 2014, Pietsch et al. 2011, Zhang et al. 2015), water collection (Yang et al. 2013), etc. There are three main kinds of thermo-responsive soft matters: (1) shape-memory polymers; (2) liquid crystalline elastomers (or liquid crystal elastomers, LCEs); (3) thermo-responsive hydrogels. They have different working mechanisms that will be outlined briefl y in this introductory section.
