Anne Helene Gelebart was born in Saint-Renan (France). She graduated from high school in Sciences in Brest (France). After, she studied chemistry in Rennes (France) and got her Diplome universitaire de technologie in chemistry (DUT, equivalent to a Higher National Diploma) at the university of Rennes. After acquiring this diploma, she went to Compiegne (France) to start her master studies at ESCOM (School of Organic and Inorganic Chemistry). As part of this Master she had the opportunity to do an internship of 12 months abroad. She went to Sabic Innovative Plastics (The Netherlands) to gain her first experience in the field of the polymer research. After what she came back to France to complete her master. At that stage she decided to get specialized in polymer chemistry and followed courses in Strasbourg at the ECPM (Chemistry school for polymers and materials). She finalized her master by doing her thesis at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) (The Netherlands). Where she worked for 6 months on photoresponsive membranes based on liquid crystalline network.
Research
The long-term objective of this project is to create responsive surfaces that are (self-) oscillating and thereby create surfaces that are capable to transport species, are potentially self-cleaning or induce peristaltic pumping. Furthermore, controlled deformation of soft system is of interest for many application ranging from microfluidic to robotic and drug delivery.
The first step toward that goal is to create reversible deformation in soft system. Liu et al [1a-1c] recently create a broad set of system based on a cholesteric liquid crystalline network able to undergo surface deformation up to 10% of the initial thickness in a reversible way. The protrusion can be formed upon exposure to UV light while light and temperature can be used to go back to the initial shape.
We are now developing a soft system having a dual response so that we don’t only have an ‘off’ and ‘on’ state but rather multiple ‘on’ states. Our study will be based on a liquid crystal network. The main advantage of working with liquid crystals is the anisotropy that they bring to the system induced by their self-assembly over relatively large length scales. This allows us to control the deformation of the studied system by playing with different type of alignment and/or phases. Furthermore, the mixture can be tuned to respond to different stimuli such as light, electricity, and humidity.
A next step is to combine two of the above described system in order to obtain a dual response.
1.a) D. Liu, Soft Matter, 10(40), 7952-7958 b) D. Liu Soft Matter, 9(2), 588-596., c) D. Liu, Advances in Science and Technology, 77, 325-332.
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