ELECTRICAL ACTUATION AND VISION-BASED CONTROL OF SHAPE MEMORY POLYMER CARBON NANOCOMPOSITES

摘要

Shape memory polymers (SMPs) are one of the most popular smart materials due to their fantasticproperties and greatly potential application in recent years. This paper presents a study on thesynergistic effect of carbon nanofiber (CNF) and carbon nanofiber paper (CNFP) on shape memorypolymer (SMP) nanocomposites actuation by applying electric current. Shape memory effect hasbeen greatly improved due to the significant increase of electrical conductivity by combining CNFand CNFP into SMP composites. CNFP is used to facilitate the actuation by electrical resistanceheating. In order to accelerate the electro-active response, the bulk thermal and electricalconductivity of SMP nanocomposite is increased by mixing CNFs with SMP. A vision based 3Dcoordinate prediction system is designed to sense and controls the deformation of the SMPcomposites with current and voltage applied. Compared with baseline material, the recovery speed ofSMP nanocomposites is increased up to 1,000%. In order to investigate the themomechanicalproperty of SMP composite, Dynamic Mechanical Analysis (DMA) test has been carried out as well.Furthermore, the control tests of SMP nanocomposites show that they had a reasonably fast responseof ～90 seconds. In the conducted 100 experiments and the desired deflection angle can be achievedwithin a 5% error bound.