Effect of Ionic Polymer Membrane with Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes on the Mechanical Performance of Ionic Electroactive Polymer Actuators.

Joohee Kim,Minjeong Park,Minhyon Jeon,Seonpil Kim

doi:10.3390/polym12020396

Joohee Kim, Minjeong Park + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/polym12020396

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Journal: Polymers	Publication Date: Feb 10, 2020
Citations: 12	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Inje University, Gyeongju University

Abstract

Ionic electroactive polymer (IEAP) actuators have received interest because of their advantageous properties, including their large displacement, high energy density, light weight, and low power consumption under a low electric field. However, they have a low blocking force under driving, and it is difficult to control the thickness of the ionic polymer membrane. In this study, an IEAP actuator is fabricated using a Nafion membrane with added multiwalled carbon nanotubes to increase the blocking force. A heat press two-step process is also developed to produce a constant and uniform membrane. The fabricated Nafion membrane with 0.2 wt% multiwalled carbon nanotubes has the largest displacement and highest blocking force. As a result, the developed heat press two-step method can be used in various polymer-casting fields, and the fabricated carbon nanotube-based IEAP actuators can serve as useful references in fields such as flexible robotics and artificial muscles.

Highlights

The advantageous properties of ionic electroactive polymer (IEAP) actuators include their large displacement, high energy density, light weight, and low power consumption under low electric fields [1,2,3,4]
We developed a heat press two-step (HPTS) process to obtain Nafion membranes with uniform thicknesses and fabricated N-multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs)-based IEAP actuators
The Nafion membranes with MWCNTs (N-MWCNT) 0.2 wt% membrane had a higher thermal stability than both the Nafion membrane without MWCNTs and the other N-MWCNT membranes. These results show that the thermal stability of the N-MWCNT 0.2 wt% membrane was improved because the MWCNTs were well dispersed in the Nafion membrane

Summary

Introduction

The advantageous properties of ionic electroactive polymer (IEAP) actuators include their large displacement, high energy density, light weight, and low power consumption under low electric fields [1,2,3,4]. IEAP actuators are limited by the commercially available Nafion thicknesses (e.g., N115, N117, and N1110), and various studies on controlling their thickness using a Nafion solution have been reported [6,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. Since the thickness of the membrane significantly affects its properties and experimental behavior, it is highly important to fabricate consistent and uniform membranes like those that are commercially available membranes in order to compare and verify experimental results. For these reasons, N,N0 -dimethylformamide (DMF) was used to cast the Nafion membranes in this study. DMF is highly compatible with the Nafion tetrafluoroethylene backbone, and enables the formation of a membrane in which the Nafion molecules do not aggregate [17]

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