Improvement of viscoelastic effects of dielectric elastomer actuator and its application for valve devices

Abstract

In this paper we investigated the actuation behavior of the antagonistically driven Dielectric Elastomer Actuators (DEAs). The motivation is to improve the viscoelastic creeping behavior that intrinsically exists within most DEAs, since creeping behavior may cause some unwanted effects to the performance of DEAs, especially when we apply the DEAs to some mechanical devices which need to operate stably for a long time. Our experimental results showed that the actuator can generate very stable displacement, make the pattern of actuator's movement more regular and take advantage of mechanical energy in a more efficient way by coating two dielectric elastomers with different area ratios and applying DC voltage to both of them at the same time.