Electroactive Polymers as Artificial Muscles Changing Robotics Paradigms
The recent emergence of EAP materials with large displacement response enabled great potentials for these materials.
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The recent emergence of EAP materials with large displacement response enabled great potentials for these materials.
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This paper reviews the capability and potential of the available EAP and the challenges to the application.
NASA is using actuation devices for many space applications and there is an increasing need to cut their cost as well as reduce their size, mass, and power consumption. Existing transducing actuators, such as piezoceramics, are inducing limited displacement levels. Potentially, electroactive polymers (so called EAP) can be formed as inexpensive, low-mass, low-power, miniature muscle actuators that are superior to the widely used actuators.
Compliant electrodes to replace conventional metal electrodes have been required for many actuators to relieve the constraint on the electroactive layer. Many conducting polymers have been proposed for the alternative electrodes, but they still have a problem of poor thermal stability. This article reports a novel all-organic actuator with single wall carbon nanotube (SWCNT) films as the alternative electrode. The SWCNT film was obtained by filtering a SWCNT solution through an anodized alumina membrane. The conductivity of the SWCNT film was about 280 S/cm. The performance of the SWCNT film electrode was characterized by measuring the dielectric properties of NASA Langley Research Center - Electroactive Polymer (LaRC-EAP) sandwiched by the SWCNT electrodes over a broad range of temperature (from 25 C to 280 C) and frequency (from 1 KHz to 1 MHz). The all-organic actuator with the SWCNT electrodes showed a larger electric field-induced strain than that with metal electrodes, under identical measurement conditions.
Miniature, lightweight, low-cost actuators that consume low-power can be used to develop unmatched robotic devices to make an impact on many technolgy areas.
This paper reviews the status of the EAP infrastructure and the challenges to practical application of EAP materials as actuators.
Miniature, lightweight, miser actuators that operate similar to biological muscles can be used to develop robotic devices with unmatched capabilities to impact many technology areas.
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A hybrid model that addressed a complete ultrasonic motor as a system was developed. The model allows using powerful commercial FE package to express dynamic characteristics of the stator and the rotor in engineering practice. An analog model couples the finite element models for the stator and rotor for the stator-interface layer-rotor syste. The model provides reasonably accurate results for CAD.
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The paper presents a brief review in the field of electroactive polymers. it outlines the main classes of electroactive polymers, their properties and applications. Current efforts to synthesize electroactive polymers with novel or improved characteristics along with the challenges, opportunities and future research directions in the subject area are discussed.
Actuator mechanisms that are lightweight, durable, and efficient are needed to support telerobotic requirements for future NASA missions.
This reported study is concentrating on the development of effective EAPs and the resultant enabling mechanisms employing their unique characteristics.
In recent years the use of ionic polymer metal composites such as Nafion-based platinum ionomers have emerged as electroactive polymer materials with great potential for robotics and other applications.
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Explore the source record for details and available documents.