The mechanical and electrical effects of clamping force on the performance of the ionic polymer-metal composite (IPMC) actuators has been investigated experimentally in this study. The electrode contacts are appeared at the interface between IPMC and ...
The mechanical and electrical effects of clamping force on the performance of the ionic polymer-metal composite (IPMC) actuators has been investigated experimentally in this study. The electrode contacts are appeared at the interface between IPMC and clamping device. During the clamping process, the actuator stiffness and contact resistance are changed. In particular, the dynamic responses of the IPMC actuator highly depend on many parameters such as topology of the surface, elastic modulus, thickness, humidity, and clamping force, etc. The present experimental results show that the contact resistance and mechanical stiffness of contact region strongly influence the actuation performance due to clamping process of very soft polymer membrane in the IPMC actuators. An exact electro-mechanical model is developed for fully describing the actuation performance by considering structural damping, hydrodynamic loading and electrical force. This study shows that there exists an critical clamping force to obtain the best performance of the IPMC actuator.