Electroactive paper actuator

Deshpande SD, Kim J, Yun SR (2005b) Studies on conducting polymer electroactive paper actuators effect of humidity and electrode thickness. Smart Mater Struct 14 876-880. doi 10.1088/0964-1726/14/4/048... 

Bar-Cohen, Y., Xue, T., Shahinpoor, M., Simpson, J.O., and Smith, J., Flexible, low-mass robotic arm actuated by electroactive polymers. Proceedings ofSPIE 5th Annual International Symposium on Smart Structures and Materials, March 1998, San Diego, CA, Paper no. 3329-07. 

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. 

Figure 18-5 shows the displacement output of the actuator as a function of voltage (Vp p) and relative humidity (%) at 4Hz. At 5 V, it exhibited the maximum displacement of 4.3 mm. This value corresponds to the electric field strength of 0.25 V/pm, which is very low comparing with other electronic electroactive polymers (150 V/pm) (Su et al. 1999). This low actuation voltage is an advantage of the EAPap actuautor. The tip displacement result shows that the displacement increases with the humidity. Normally, there is a decrease in the elastic modulus of paper when the... 

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