Hierarchically Structured and Scalable Artificial Muscles for Smart Textiles

Fiber-based artificial muscles with excellent actuation performance are gaining great attention as soft materials for flexible actuators; however, current advances in fiber-based artificial muscles generally suffer from high cost, harsh stimulation regimes, limiting deformations, chemical toxicity, or complex manufacturing processing, which hinder the widespread application of those artificial muscles in engineering and practical usage. Herein, a facile cross-scale processing strategy is presented to construct commercially available nontoxic viscose fibers into fast responsive and humidity-driven yarn artificial muscles with a recorded torsional stroke of 1752° cm–1 and a maximum rotation speed up to 2100 rpm, which are comparable to certain artificial muscles made from carbon-based composite materials. The underlying mechanism of such outstanding actuation performance that begins to form at a mesoscale is discussed by theoretical modeling and microstructure characterization. The as-prepared yarn artificial muscles are further scaled up to large-sized fabric muscles through topological weaving structures by integrating different textile technologies. These fabric muscles extend the simple motion of yarn muscles into higher-level diverse deformations without any composite system, complex synthetic processing, and component design, which enables the development of new fiber-based artificial muscles for versatile applications, such as smart textiles and intelligent systems.