Towards the design of electric field driven self‐folding gripper

摘要

Electroactive polymer (EAPs)-based technologies have shown promise in areas such as artificial muscles, aerospace,medical devices and soft robotics because of large electromechanical actuation at relatively high speed. The promises ofEAPs have led us to study EAP-based grippers. The in-plane actuation of P(VDF-TrFE-CTFE) is converted into bendingactuation using unimorph configurations, where one passive substrate layer is attached to the active polymer. On-demandsegmented folding is harnessed from this pure bending actuation by creating notch samples with an aim to implement themfor applications like soft robotics gripper. In this paper, we studied the effect of various design parameters of notchedfolding actuators to establish a design reference and maximize the actuation performance of EAP based devices. Bothfinite element analysis (FEA) and micromechanics based analytical study is performed to investigate the effect of actuatorparameters on the folding actuation of notched samples. The notched configuration has been analyzed via FEA for thenon-uniform deformations and stress-fields. FEA analysis shows the importance of notch positioning to maximize theelectromechanical performance. On the other hand, analytical study has proposed a design curve for the selection of propernotch parameters (e.g. notch length and Young’s Modulus) to maximize the actuation performance. Finally, based on theFEA and analytical analysis, a human finger inspired ‘finger-like’ biomimetic actuator is realized by assigning multiplenotches to the structure.