Developing organic molecular crystal actuators and their engineering
My objective is to achieve real-life applications of organinc crystal materials. For several decades, organic crystalline materials have been extnsively developed with the wide range of properties, such as optical properties, ferroelectric materials, semiconductors, sensors, and actuators. I am perticularly attracted by the acctuation capability of organic crystals due to their fascinating phenomena, their beautiful appearances, and of course, my huge curiosity. Organic crystal actuators are almost driven by light and heat and expected to be applicable to future devices and soft robots. However, they have still been focused based only on the fundamental chemical research, not extending on the engineering research, and thus they remain several problems as engineed materials. When I was a PhD student at Waseda University, Japan, I firstly discovered the effective drive force that actuate crystals at high-speed: the photothermal effect and natural vibration, and established methods for evaluating output force and simulating dynamic actuation behavior by the combination of crystal chemistry and material engineering. These achievement led organic crystal actuators to the engineed actuators as same as conventional metals, inorganics, polymers, and LCEs, and will reach the practical applications of organic crystalline materials. To seize this future achievement, I conduct to collaborate with various research field and tackle to expand my founded research field: phootothermally driven high-speed actuation of crystals, establish the quantitative evaluation methods, and fabricate crystalline materials with the desired capabilities, with many collaborators.
For details, please see the press release as below or achievement page.