Wet Spinning Liquid Crystal Elastomers for Responsive Fibers and Filaments

Fibers are among the most versatile material forms in contemporary applications, including textiles, biomedicine, and aerospace. Recent advances in fiber science have reframed filaments as environmentally responsive materials, capitalizing on emerging classes of functional polymers to enhance sensing, electrical, and mechanical performance. Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are such a class of materials capable of large and reversible deformations in response to magnetic, thermal, and optical stimuli. The combination of soft elasticity and anisotropic ordering makes them promising candidates for applications in smart textiles and soft robotics. While significant advances have been made in synthesis and formulation of LCEs, scalable and continuous fabrication of LCE filaments remains a central challenge. In this Perspective, we examine emerging strategies for producing LCE filaments, with an emphasis on wet-spinning approaches that can enable molecular alignment within the LCE network during fiber processing. We discuss the relevant LCE chemistry and filament processing constraints, and outline the key principles governing wet spinning, emphasizing how solvent exchange, diffusion, and reaction kinetics interact. We review recent advances encompassing microfluidics, reaction-diffusion, and composite spinning strategies. We conclude with an outlook on framing the wet spinning of LCE filaments as a reaction-diffusion-alignment problem and identify critical gaps that are essential to translate LCEs into scalable actuators for smart textiles and soft robotic applications.