tailieunhanh - Dielectric Elastomers as Electromechanical Transducers

New electromechanical transducers with high energy output, high strains, high mechanical compliance, lightweight, damage-tolerance and low cost can enable needed advances in a variety of applications, such as robotics, automation and biomedical devices. The perceived need for improved transducer performance, which has progressively emerged in the last few decades, has drawn considerable efforts for the development of devices relying on materials with intrinsic transduction properties. These materials, often termed “smart” or “intelligent”, include improved piezoelectrics and magnetostrictive or shape-memory materials | FL2EY1EX Dielectric Elastomers as Electromechanical Transducers Fundamentals Materials. Devices Models and Applications of an Emerging Electroactive Polymer Technology Edited by Federico Carpi Danilo De Rossi Roy Kornbluh Ronald Pelrine and Peter Sommer-Larsen Copyrtonud Mwttnr PREFACE New electromechanical transducers with high energy output high strains high mechanical compliance lightweight damage-tolerance and low cost can enable needed advances in a variety of applications such as robotics automation and biomedical devices. The perceived need for improved transducer performance which has progressively emerged in the last few decades has drawn considerable efforts for the development of devices relying on materials with intrinsic transduction properties. These materials often termed smart or intelligent include improved piezoelectrics and magnetostrictive or shape-memory materials. While these technologies have addressed niche applications and continue to make incremental improvements newer emerging electromechanical transduction technologies based on so-called electroactive polymers EAP have gained a considerable attention. EAP offer the potential for performance exceeding other smart materials while retaining the cost and versatility inherent in polymer materials. EAP are currently being developed and significantly studied as possible artificial muscles . functional surrogates of natural muscles aimed at mimicking performances of biological actuation machines. Within the EAP family a specific class of materials known as dielectric elastomers is drawing particular interest at present because of its already demonstrated good overall performance as well as its simplicity of structure and robustness due to the use of stable and commercially available polymer materials. Dielectric elastomer transducers are rapidly emerging as high-performance pseudo-muscular actuators useful for different kinds of tasks. Further in addition to actuation dielectric elastomers .