Research on basic electro-mechanical performance of electroactive dielectric elastomer

Dielectric Elastomer is considered as a kind of promising biomimetic actuator material which behaves similar to human muscle and can produce significantly large strain at high pre-stretch. It generated considerable interests in recent years for use in robotics and mechatronic applications. This paper is mainly on fundamental planar actuation experiment from which we abstract some Voltage-Area deformation curves under different cases. These curves and corresponding numerical analyses are presented to show how the key factors affect area deformation, such as the voltage, pre-stretch, length, width, and carbon electrodes covering shape. A cylinder axial extension actuator is also fabricated and examined in the paper. Two kinds of material are used in the experiment, VHB4910 and 6100C. The differences between them are also examined.