Robotic Materials

Analysis of Safe and Failure Mode Regimes of Dielectric Elastomer Actuators

2008

Conference Paper

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Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) are promising for bionic and robotic applications. Reliability requirements in such applications necessitate better knowledge of the safe operation regimes and possible failure modes of DEAs. Elastomers consist of a network of entangled and cross-linked polymer chains, able to sustain spatially varying stress and strain fields, accompanied by stored elastic energy. Here we introduce a rigorous thermodynamic description of DEAs, based on a statistical mechanical model to gain insight for material development and optimization. We investigate multistability effects in the phase diagrams of elastomer actuators and combine our model with capacitive extensometry experiments.

Author(s): Martin Kaltenbrunner and Christoph Keplinger and Nikita Arnold and Siegfried Bauer
Book Title: Proceedings of the IEEE SENSORS 2008 Conference
Pages: 156-159
Year: 2008
Month: October
Department(s): Robotic Materials
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)
Paper Type: Conference
DOI: 10.1109/ICSENS.2008.4716407
Address: Lecce, Italy
State: Published

BibTex 

@inproceedings{Keplinger08-SENS-Analysis,
  title = {Analysis of Safe and Failure Mode Regimes of Dielectric Elastomer Actuators},
  author = {Kaltenbrunner, Martin and Keplinger, Christoph and Arnold, Nikita and Bauer, Siegfried},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE SENSORS 2008 Conference},
  pages = {156-159},
  address = {Lecce, Italy},
  month = oct,
  year = {2008},
  doi = {10.1109/ICSENS.2008.4716407},
  month_numeric = {10}
}