Design and Characterization of an Equibiaxial Multi-Electrode Dielectric Elastomer Actuator

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new soft actuator design that achieves higher strain and better performance for use in biomedical and electronics applications.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel equibiaxial dielectric elastomer actuator design with improved strain and area utilization.

Findings

The equibiaxial DEA achieves 12.75% strain at 60 V μm−1 over a 7 cm² area.

It outperforms traditional dot actuators by 1.3 times in strain.

The design optimizes passive regions for better performance in applications like cell cultures.

Abstract

With the ongoing journey of automation advancements and a trend towards miniaturization, the choice of actuator plays a crucial role. Over recent years, soft actuators have demonstrated their usefulness in various applications, especially where light weight and high strain are required. Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) are a class of soft actuators that provide high-strain actuation possibilities in applications like biomedicine, logistics, or consumer electronics. A variety of work featuring DEAs for actuation has been carried out in recent years, but a single work detailing the design conception, fabrication, modeling and experimental validation is lacking, especially in the context of achieving high strains with the integration of multiple electrodes and their interaction. This work discusses these issues with an equibiaxial DEA, enabling optimized equibiaxial strain patterns due to full use of the available actuation area. The developed DEA can achieve an equibiaxial strain of 12.75% for actuation at 60 V μm−1 over an active area of 7 cm2 which is an improvement of 1.3 times compared to traditional dot actuators. These properties position the device as a promising alternative for various applications like cell cultures or microassembly and provide an advantage of optimized use of passive regions within the actuator.

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