Electrically active polymers applications

Hirai T., Zheng J., Watanabe M., Electrically active polymer materials - application of non-ionic polymer gel and elastomers for artificial muscles in Tao X. (ed.) Smart Fibres, Fabrics and Clothing, Woodhead Publishing, Cambridge. 2001. 

Electrically active polymer materials -application of non-ionic polymer gel and elastomers for artificial muscles... 

This chapter reviews in detail the principles and applications of heterogeneous electron transfer reaction analysis at tip and sample electrodes. The first section summarizes the basic principles and concepts. It is followed by sections dedicated to one class of sample material glassy carbon, metals and semiconductors, thin layers, ion-conducting polymers, and electrically conducting polymers. A separate section is devoted to practical applications, in essence the study of heterogeneous catalysis and in situ characterization of sensors. The final section deals with the experiments defining the state of the art in this field and the outlook for some future activities. Aspects of heterogeneous electron transfer reactions in more complex systems, such as... 

In this application, the conducting polymer serves as the chemically-sensitive film that transduces an immunoassay into an electrical signal. A major advantage in using conducting polymers for immunoassay-based biosensors (immunosensors) is that antibodies can be coated directly onto the active polymer surface with little degradation of antibody functionality. 

Today the number of electroactive polymers has grown substantially. There currently exists a wide variety of such materials, ranging from rigid carbon-nanotubes to soft dielectric elastomers. A number of reviews and overviews have been prepared on these and other materials for use as artificial muscles and other applications [1, 2, 7, 10, 11, 13-28]. The next section will provide a survey of the most common electrically activated EAP technologies and provide some pertinent performance values. The remainder of the paper will focus specifically on dielectric elastomers. Several actuation properties for these materials are summarized in Table 1.1 along with other actuation technologies including mammalian muscle. It is important to note that data was recorded for different materials under different conditions so the information provided in the table should only be used as a qualitative comparison tool. 

Most of the reported conjugated polymers with nonlinear optical or electrical activities are carbon-carbon conjugated systems, such as the extensively studied polyenes (e.g., polyacetylenes [15], polydiacetylenes [16,17], poly-/ -phenylenes) and heteroaromatic polymers (e.g., polypyrroles, polythiophenes, polycarbazoles, polyanilines) [18]. The synthetic methods, applications, and the structure-property relationships of these polymers have also been substantially investigated [19-21]. 

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