Several generations of ionic polymer metal composite (IPMC) actuators have been developed since 1992. It has been discovered that the composite electrodes which are composed of electronic and ionic conductors, have great impact on performance of ionic polymer actuators by affecting strain level, efficiency and speed. One of important factors in composite electrodes is the shape and morphology o...

Motivated by their structural monitoring and energy harvesting applications, in this article, we study the modeling and inverse compensation of cantilevered ionic polymer–metal composite sensors that are excited at base. The proposed dynamic model is physics based, combines the vibration dynamics of a flexible beam under base excitation and the ion transport dynamics within an ionic polymer–met...

the muscle-like technology would be of enormous advantages for biomedical applications such as medical implants and human assist devices. ionic polymer metal composites (ipmcs) are one kind of biomimetic actuators. an ionic polymer metal composite composed from an ionomer with high ion exchange capacity that packed between two thin metal layers. in the present study we focused on the preparatio...

We present a multi-scale approach to modeling the electro-mechanical behavior of ionic polymers. We start with a detailed elasto-electro-chemical model which allows for nite deformation. We reduce it to one space dimension appropriate for the commonly used sheet con guration, and demonstrate that steady state solutions display an important boundary layer e ect. We conclude with a macroscopic mo...

© 2012 Chen et al., licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Ionic Polymer-Metal Composite Artificial Muscles in Bio-Inspired Engineering Research: ...

      The muscle-like technology would be of enormous advantages for biomedical applications such as medical implants and human assist devices. Ionic polymer metal composites (IPMCs) are one kind of biomimetic actuators. An ionic polymer metal composite composed from an ionomer with high ion exchange capacity that packed between two thin metal layers. In the present study we focused on the prep...

Ionic electromechanically active polymers (IEAP) are laminar composites that can be considered attractive candidates for soft actuators. Their outstanding properties such as low operating voltage, easy miniaturization, and noiseless operation are, however, marred by issues related to the repeatability in the production and operation of these materials. Implementing closed-loop control for IEAP ...