Improving electroactive polymer actuator by tuning ionic liquid concentration

초록

We have fabricated actuators from a blend of fluoropolymer (FP) with ionic liquid (IL). Here a combination of graphene, graphite, and silver nanoparticles is used to raise the electrode conductivity. As the electrode composition is fixed, we found that the actuator displacement increases with decreasing amount of ionic liquid in the polymer gel electrolyte. A maximum strain of 0.48% was observed from peak-to-peak displacement for an actuator with IL/FP = 0.3 in the polymer gel electrolyte. The simulation results indicate that lowering IL concentration leads to a more compact ion distribution in the electrode layers and hence explains the increased strain in the actuators. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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