Dynamic Electromechanical Modeling of Dielectric Elastomer Actuators With Metallic Electrodes

Abstract

In this paper, a nonlinear electromechanical model for a PolyPower dielectric elastomer actuator is proposed based on an electric circuit model coupled with a viscoelastic mechanical model. The parameters of the model are found by fitting to an electrical step impulse for the mechanical part and by standard methods for the electric circuit. The resulting model is compared with experiments for a range of sinusoidal stimuli. The comparison shows good agreement between experiments and model results.