The emergence of soft polymer actuators brings a great deal of excitement in the robotics and biomedical engineering community because of the possibilities to easily mimic the motion of living organisms and ability to manipulate living tissue and cells without damaging it. Some of the applications of soft polymer actuators, such as micropumps, require them to operate at high frequency and large displacement, which usually achieved near resonance. It would be beneficial for the designer, if he could easily tailor the frequency response and the resonance frequency to suit the operating conditions. We propose such an effective method of modification of the frequency response of ionic polymer metal composite (IPMC) actuators by introducing an anisotropic roughness on their surface.

Date Published: 10 April 2008
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 6927, Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices (EAPAD) 2008, 69270K (10 April 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.776520

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6927:
Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices (EAPAD) 2008
Yoseph Bar-Cohen, Editor(s)