ISSN:
1662-0356
Source:
Scientific.Net: Materials Science & Technology / Trans Tech Publications Archiv 1984-2008
Topics:
Natural Sciences in General
,
Technology
Notes:
One of the key factors to obtain large displacements and high efficiency with dielectricelectroactive polymer (DEAPs) actuators is to have compliant electrodes. Attempts to scale DEAPsdown to the mm or micrometer range have encountered major difficulties, mostly due to thechallenge of micropatterning sufficiently compliant electrodes. Simply evaporating or sputteringthin metallic films on elastomer membranes produces DEAPs whose stiffness is dominated by themetallic film.Low energy metal ion implantation for fabricating compliant electrodes in DEAPs presents severaladvantages: a) it is clean to work with, b) it does not add thick passive layers, and c) it can be easilypatterned. We use this technology to fabricate DEAPs micro-actuators whose relative displacementis the same as for macro-scale DEAPs. With transmission electron microscope (TEM) we observedthe formation of metallic clusters within the elastomer (PDMS) matrix, forming a nano-composite.We focus our studies on relating the properties of this nano-composite to the implantationparameters. We identified the optimal implantation parameters for which an implanted electrodepresents an exceptional combination of high electrical conductivity and low compliance
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://www.tib-hannover.de/fulltexts/2011/0528/01/42/transtech_doi~10.4028%252Fwww.scientific.net%252FAST.61.18.pdf
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