서강대학교

초록/요약

IPMCs (Ionic Polymer Metal-Composite) having large deformation have used as bio-mimetic actuators and sensors in various application fields. This work mainly deals with the improving performances of IPMCs through various methods. Firstly, this work replaces the conventional platinum electrode with new material, verifying the performance improvement of the new IPMC by measuring the dynamic characteristics and frequency responses. The second part of this work is about static and dynamic electromechanical responses of multi-layered (multimorphs) IPMC structures as actuators. The actuating behavior of IPMC is caused by the bending moments generated by an ion exchange polymer film to an applied voltage. Dynamic characteristics such as the natural frequencies, maximum displacement and resultant force are analyzed and predicted based on the Bernoulli-Euler beam theory including the dynamics of the IPMC, electrode and substrate layers. We also compared the theoretical properties of a symmetric IPMC multimorph with the results by the finite element analysis (FEA) and experiments using 1, 2, 3, 4-layered IPMC multimorphs. In addition, we investigate the effects of the layer number and the layer thickness on the dynamic properties. It is found that there exists an optimum number of IPMC layers to maximize the transverse deflection or the resultant force.