Modeling and designing IPMCs for twisting motion:electromechanical and mechanoelectrical transduction

摘要

This paper presents a study of IPMCs for twisting motion. To accomplish the twisting electromechanical trans-duction of IPMC, patterned electrodes were used. Here we present a three dimensional (3D) finite element (FE) model based on the fundamental physical principles. Due to very high aspect ratio of the dimensions of IPMC materials, constructing a full scale 3D model that includes charge transport, continuum mechanics, and electro-statics equations for the electrodes is challenging. Therefore, a process where some of the data is calculated in a scaled 2D domain and is later used to calculate the mechanoelectrical transduction in a full scale 3D domain is presented. The modeling results are compared to experimentally measured data. In the second part of the paper, the twisting mechanoelectrical transduction study of the IPMCs is introduced. A 3D FE model, again based on the fundamental physical principles, was developed to estimate the generated charge. In case of the mechanoelectrical transduction simulations, the full model was calculated in a 3D domain.