Abstract
Smart and soft electroactive polymer actuators as building blocks for soft robotics have many beneficial properties that could make them useful in future biomimetic and biomedical applications. Gelatin—a material exploited for medical applications—can be used to make a fully biologically benign soft electroactive polymer actuator that provides high performance and has been shown to be harmless. In our study, these polypyrrole-gelatin trilayer actuators with choline acetate and choline isobutyrate showed the highest strain difference and highest efficiency in strain difference to charge density ratios compared to a reference system containing imidazolium-based ionic liquid and a traditional polyvinylidene fluoride (PVdF) membrane material. As neither the relative ion sizes nor the measured parameters of the ionic liquids could explain their behavior in the actuators, molecular dynamics simulations and density functional theory calculations were conducted. Strong cation-cation clustering was found and the radial distribution functions provided further insight into the topic, showing that the cation-cation correlation peak height is a good predictor of strain difference of the actuators.
Highlights
There is a high demand for versatile biofriendly materials in biomedical and soft robotics fields.Ionic electromechanically active polymer (IEAP) actuators are assured to fulfill this demand due to their attractive properties, like low operation voltage [1,2,3], mechanical flexibility [4], and self-sensing [5].The IEAP actuators are proven to be tailorable to suit the requirements by giving them the necessary shape or structure [6].So far, these materials have shown promising performance, but applications have remained limited because of toxicity considerations
The objective of this research was to investigate the various aspects of the behavior of IEAP actuators made from biologically benign choline ionic liquids (ILs), PPy, and gelatin
The ionic conductivities of the chosen choline ILs were determined in pure form and in the gelatin membrane
Summary
There is a high demand for versatile biofriendly materials in biomedical and soft robotics fields.Ionic electromechanically active polymer (IEAP) actuators are assured to fulfill this demand due to their attractive properties, like low operation voltage [1,2,3], mechanical flexibility [4], and self-sensing [5].The IEAP actuators are proven to be tailorable to suit the requirements by giving them the necessary shape or structure [6].So far, these materials have shown promising performance, but applications have remained limited because of toxicity considerations. Ionic electromechanically active polymer (IEAP) actuators are assured to fulfill this demand due to their attractive properties, like low operation voltage [1,2,3], mechanical flexibility [4], and self-sensing [5]. The IEAP actuators are proven to be tailorable to suit the requirements by giving them the necessary shape or structure [6]. These materials have shown promising performance, but applications have remained limited because of toxicity considerations. Natural origin polymers possess many favorable properties: similarity with the extracellular matrix, chemical versatility, variable mechanical properties, and biological performance without toxicity or immunological reactions.
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