Data for: Melt electrowriting enabled 3D liquid crystal elastomer structures for cross-scale actuators and temperature field sensors

Liquid crystal elastomers have garnered significant attention due to their remarkable capability to undergo reversible strains and shape transformations under various stimuli. Early studies on LCE primarily focused on limited shape changes of macrostructures or quasi-3D microstructures. However, fabricating complex cross-scale LCE-based 3D structures still remains challenging. Here, we report a compatible method, the Melt-Electrohydrodynamic (Melt-EHD) 3D printing, to create LCE-based microfiber actuators and various 3D actuators across micrometer to centimeter scales, showcasing their actuation to thermal airflow stimulus. By controlling printing parameters, microfiber actuators with different diameters (5 μm~70 μm), and tunable properties including actuation strain (10%~55%), actuation stress (0~0.6 MPa), and large work density (~160J/kg) have been demonstrated. Under dynamic thermal airflow stimulus at 15 Hz, the microfiber actuators lift weights over 3500 times heavier than themselves. These 3D structures were obtained by depositing LCE microfibers along pre-programmed paths, including various gradient-responsive elementary structural units, 1 mm-sized microgripper, and various large area 3D lattice structures. In addition, by integrating a Deep Learning model, we have demonstrated, for the first time, large area (≥ centimeter scale), real-time (24 Hz sampling frequency), high-precision (~95%) LCE grid based spatial temperature field sensors with a spatial resolution of only 4 mm.