Potential Applications of FLCPs

Chapter V of this Handbook is entirely devoted to the potential applications of the side chain liquid crystal polymers, but it is interesting to mention here the main areas where FLCPs could play a role. As far as we know, the following applications can be considered for SmC LCPs nonlinear optics, pyroelectric detectors, and display devices. 

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This is certainly the most advanced potential application of FLCPs. Taking advantage of the processability of FLC polymers, Idemitsu Kosan Co. has fabricated a large-area, static-driven display (12x100 cm) and a dynamically driven simple matrix display (13x37 cm) [7, 19]. The performance of these two demonstrators is summarized in Table 8. The electrooptic material used was plasticized polyoxyethylene XVIII (Fig. 26). 

The surface-stabilized ferroelectric liquid crystals in the smectic C (SmC ) phase are among the most interesting types of liquid-crystalline systems because of their potential applications in high-resolution flat panel displays and fast electro-optical devices [73-76]. Within this class of compounds, ferroelectric liquid-crystalline polymers (FLCPs) have gained theoretical and practical interest as systems which combine the properties of polymers and ferroelectric liquid crystals. This combination is achieved by attaching the ferroelectric mesogen to a main chain via a flexible spacer... 

As pointed out already in Section 2.5.5, low-molecular weight ferroelectric liquid crystals (FLCs) and FLCPs are attracting a lot of interest because of their potential for electro-optical applications. The polymers offer new possibilities, e.g., as elastomers for piezoelectric elements or by copolymerization [77, 78, 105] due to the formation of intrinsic mixtures between SmC mesogenic units and other comonomers. This leads to FLCPs combining several material properties which might be utilized for colored displays in the case of comonomers containing chromophores. For the differentiated evaluation of such copolymers with reference to the possible exploitation of nonlinear optical (NLO) properties, the interplay of the different orientation tendencies of the side-chain functionalities is of crucial importance [36,106]. 

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