NASA NTRS · 20210002591
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Bar-Cohen, Y.. 2000-08-04. Electroactive polymers as artificial muscles - reality and challenges. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20210002591
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One of the newest fields of biomimetics is the electroactive polymers (EAP) that are also known as artificial muscles. To take advantage of these materials, efforts are made worldwide to establish a strong infrastructure addressing the need for comprehensive analytical modeling of their response mechanism and develop effective processing and characterization techniques. The field is still in its emerging state and robust materials are still not readily available however in recent years significant progress has been made and commercial products have already started to appear. This paper covers the current state of- the-art and challenges to making artificial muscles and their potential biomimetic applications.
Transducing materials are being used in many aspects of our daily life serving as actuators, sensors, displays, communications and other components of commercial mechanisms. At JPL, such materials are being used to enable novel space and terrestrial applications. This effort involves mostly the use of piezoelectric, electroactive polymers (EAP), and shape memory alloys (SMA). The piezoelectric based devices and mechanisms that were developed include ultrasonic motors, piezopump, ultrasonic/sonic drilledcorer (USDC), and ferrosource. Further, the electroactive polymers were used to demonstrate a gripper, wiper, lifter and haptic interfaces. The research and develop tasks consists of analytical modeling, experimental corroboration, material characterization as well as devices and mechanisms design, construction and demonstration.
This paper reviews the status of the EAP infrastructure and the challenges to practical application of EAP materials as actuators.