Permanent magnets as biasing mechanism for improving the performance of circular dielectric elastomer out-of-plane actuators

P. Loew; G. Rizzello; S. Seelecke

doi:10.1117/12.2258390

17 April 2017 Permanent magnets as biasing mechanism for improving the performance of circular dielectric elastomer out-of-plane actuators

P. Loew, G. Rizzello, S. Seelecke

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 10163, Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices (EAPAD) 2017; 101630Y (2017) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2258390
Event: SPIE Smart Structures and Materials + Nondestructive Evaluation and Health Monitoring, 2017, Portland, Oregon, United States

Abstract

Dielectric Elastomers (DE) represent an attractive technology for the realization of mechatronic actuators, due to their lightweight, high energy density, high energy efficiency, scalability, and low noise features. In order to produce a stroke, a DE membrane needs to be pre-loaded with a mechanical biasing mechanism. In our previous works, we compared the stroke achieved with different biasing mechanisms for a circular out-of-plane DE Actuator (DEA), i.e., hanging masses, linear and bi-stable springs. The novel contribution of this paper is the investigation of a biasing design approach based on permanent magnets. The resulting magnet-based actuators are usually more compact than the spring-based ones, allowing to obtain more compact systems. Two design solutions are proposed and compared, namely a first one characterized by a stable actuation, and a second one which permits to achieve a higher stroke, but it is intrinsically unstable. The effectiveness of the novel design solution is assessed by means of several experiments.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

P. Loew, G. Rizzello, and S. Seelecke "Permanent magnets as biasing mechanism for improving the performance of circular dielectric elastomer out-of-plane actuators", Proc. SPIE 10163, Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices (EAPAD) 2017, 101630Y (17 April 2017); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2258390

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