Rapid Fabrication Method for Soft Devices Using Off‐the‐Shelf Conductive and Dielectric Acrylic Elastomers

Dielectric Elastomers Conductive Elastomer Insulating Elastomer

Multiscale instabilities in soft heterogeneous dielectric elastomers.

The development of instabilities in soft heterogeneous dielectric elastomers is investigated. Motivated by experiments and possible applications, we use in our analysis the physically relevant referential electric field instead of electric displacement. In terms of this variable, a closed form solution is derived for the class of layered neo-Hookean dielectrics. A criterion for the onset of ele...

Characteristics of dielectric elastomers and fabrication of dielectric elastomer actuators for artificial muscle applications

Electroactive polymers have been studied for artificial muscle applications in last decades. One of the EAP materials, 3M VHB acrylic tapes, have shown been outstanding electromechanical coupling performance. The scope of this study is to understand the electromechanical properties of VHB acrylic material. In addition, the research explores new practical designs of soft actuators. The basic des...

Monodirectional Positioning Using Dielectric Elastomers

The rationales for the use of microsystems are numerous, including the reduction of consumables, a faster response time, the enhanced portability, the higher resolution, and the higher efficiency; moreover their application sectors are numerous. Nevertheless microproducts have still great difficulty in penetrating the market, mainly due to the limits of the fabrication processes. The hybrid app...

Functional Soft Robotic Actuators Based on Dielectric Elastomers

Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) are a promising soft actuator technology for robotics. Adding robotic functionalities—folding, variable stiffness, and adhesion—into their actuator design is a novel method to create functionalized robots with simplified actuator configurations. We first propose a foldable actuator that has a simple antagonistic DEA configuration allowing bidirectional actu...