Abstract
Artificial muscle actuator has been devoted to replicate the function of biological muscles, playing an important part of an emerging field at inter-section of bionic, mechanical, and material disciplines. Most of these artificial muscles possess their own unique functionality and irreplaceability, but also have some disadvantages and shortcomings. Among those, phase change type artificial muscles gain particular attentions, owing to the merits of easy processing, convenient controlling, non-toxic and fast-response. Herein, we prepared a silicon/ethanol/(graphene oxide/gold nanoparticles) composite elastic actuator for soft actuation. The functional properties are discussed in terms of microstructure, mechanical properties, thermal imaging and mechanical actuation characteristics, respectively. The added graphene oxide and Au nanoparticles can effectively accelerate the heating rate of material and improve its mechanical properties, thus increasing the vaporization rate of ethanol, which helps to accelerate the deformation rate and enhance the actuation capability. As part of the study, we also tested the performance of composite elastomers containing different concentrations of graphene oxide to identify GO-15 (15 mg of graphene oxide per 7.2 mL of material) flexible actuators as the best composition with a driving force up to 1.68 N.
Highlights
We evaluated the functional properties of silicone/ethanol/(Au nanoparticle, graphene oxide) elastomer composites as a new approach to improvement and as a soft actuator
It can be observed that the ethanol phase change actuator has a wellWe crater observed the microscopic morphology andby thethe structure the prepared ethanol defined structure inside, which is produced vacuoleofformed by ethanol in phase change material by scanningof electron experimental are silicone elastomer
Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) results show that the incorporation of graphene oxide and Au nanoparticles do not affect the distribution of ethanol throughout the composite elastomer
Summary
Used artificial muscles are mechanically driven, including pneumatic and hydraulic [3,4,5,6]. Various materials have been adopted to prepare the artificial muscles, which involves electroactive polymers [7,8,9,10,11,12], shape memory materials [13,14,15,16], hydrogels [17,18,19,20], and polymers driven by photothermal or humidity [21,22,23,24,25,26]. Shape-memory alloys, shape-memory polymers and photo-thermal temperature-driven polymers require complex external stimuli (laser, humidity, and temperature control), and these actuators are difficult to adapt to more complex applications. We believe that the ideal actuators need to have more direct and convenient actuation (current driven), safe actuation conditions (non-toxic and harmless to the operator), and fast and large strain capacity
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