2018 iMiD, Busan, Korea
August 28 - 31, 2017 (Tue. - Fri.), Exhibition Center I, BEXCO
High-Speed Electroactive Polymer Actuator for Artificial Muscle
Yongchan Kim, So Young Kim, Dayoon Lee, Eunsong Ji, Do Hwan Kim, and Hojin Lee
Abstract
With the development of bio-friendly soft electronic devices, artificial muscles that mimic the shapes and functions of natural muscles are attracting attention in various fields. Recently, the artificial muscles represent soft actuators. They have many advantages such as high flexibility, light density, and low power consumption. Due to these characteristics, many studies about artificial muscles are being carried out in various fields such as soft robot, prosthetics, and haptic applications. Especially, among various soft actuators, ionic polymer actuators have been attracted much interest as the advantage of low driving voltage and flexibility using volume changing due to the movement of ions in an ionic polymer layer. However, artificial muscles based on ionic polymer suffer from low displacement and force at high operating frequencies. In this manner, engineering of an optimal ion transport in the ionic films as well as mechanical properties of actuators is strongly required to allow fast actuation under electrical stimuli. In this talk, we propose a high-speed ionic polymer muscle using ionic polymer and conducting polymer (PEDOT:PSS) solution with ionic liquid and DMSO as additive by spray coating method. Also, through these methods our actuator could control an interface structure from nano to micro size between ionic polymer and electrodes. The actuator implemented by us was successfully operated with a large displacement up to 3mm (strain=0.4%) at an operating frequency of 1Hz under an applied voltage of 2V. Further, the actuator shows high-speed response under the bending strain of 0.1% and the displacement of 0.67mm even at frequency of 30Hz. This result indicates that controlling an interpenetration depth of PEDOT:PSS chains into the ionic elastomer not only decreases an internal resistance between two electrodes, but also forms more effective and nanostructured ion conducting channel, thereby leading to larger displacement and faster response of actuators even under low voltage bias. We believe that high-speed ionic polymer actuator demonstrated by us will be an effective way to implement a novel engineering design for artificial muscle capable of physiologically actuating under electrical stimuli. In this talk, we propose a high-speed ionic polymer muscle using ionic polymer and conducting polymer (PEDOT:PSS) solution with ionic liquid and DMSO as additive by spray coating method (Fig. 1). Also,