Fabrication and performance of light-driven actuator for long term and omnidirectional photothermal converter

The traditional photothermal converters had the problem of energy density loss when absorbing oblique incidence light. In this paper, we prepared an intelligent responsive light-driven actuator based on the thermal shrinkage property of the thermal-responsive hydrogel, which can track and locate to the incident light direction in the direction of 0°–90°, and has the advantages of fast response speed, high tracking accuracy, and good repeatability. Furthermore, the photothermal converter is fabricated through placing the photothermal materials on the top of the 3 × 3 array of light-driven actuator. When the light is irradiated from the 45° direction, the temperature of the photothermal converter is about 6 °C higher than that of the photothermal converter without the array of light-driven actuator, which proves that the light-driven actuator can effectively recover the energy density loss of oblique incidence.