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Electroactive Polymers for Artificial Muscles
Published in Inamuddin, Mohd Imran Ahamed, Rajender Boddula, Adil A. Gobouri, Electroactive Polymeric Materials, 2022
Zhangpeng Li, Qiulong Gao, Jinqing Wang
Artificial muscles are a class of materials or devices with similar characteristics to a biological muscle that can change in size, or shape, or both, and therefore, generate force and displacement under the activation of voltage, current, magnetic field, pressure, light, or temperature. They can contract, expand, or rotate reversibly, which produces some action outputs that are similar to their biological counterparts, and can bear large deformation and external loads (Wang, Gao, & Lee, 2021; Spinks, 2020). As society has developed, artificial muscles have become of great significance in many practical applications, such as outer space manipulators, micro reconnaissance devices, prostheses, robotics, and miniature rotating motors (Bashir & Rajendran, 2018). Therefore, it is significant and highly desirable to develop new materials to improve the performance of artificial muscles (Wang & Qu, 2016). Typical artificial muscle materials or devices include fluid-driven artificial muscles (e.g., pneumatic and hydraulic), shape-memory materials, and piezoelectric ceramics (Gu et al., 2017).
Force control of twisted and coiled polymer actuators via active control of electrical heating and forced convective liquid cooling
Published in Advanced Robotics, 2018
For decades, numerous artificial muscles have been proposed in order to implement beneficial features of biological muscles into robotics, e.g. high power-to-weight, inherent compliance, slender form factor [1]. By imitating desirable properties of the biological muscles, the artificial muscles have been considered as the one of key factors for implementing human-like and human-friendly robotics ranging from prosthetic limbs, exoskeletons to medical devices [2,3]. Unfortunately, traditional artificial muscles experienced difficulties in imitating properties of the biological muscles due to mechanical and control issues. Traditional pneumatic actuators have high power-to-weight and inherent compliance, but need to be pneumatically operated in addition to electrical power sources, which is challenging to be used in autonomous robotics [4–6]. Shape memory alloys (SMAs) have fast responses and large strokes, but they are expensive and have strong nonlinearities which make them hard to control [7,8]. As for electrostrictive rubbers and electrostatic actuators, they show large strokes and high efficiencies but require high electrical voltage to be actuated [9,10].
A proposal of a new rotational-compliant joint with oil-hydraulic McKibben artificial muscles
Published in Advanced Robotics, 2018
Ryusuke Morita, Hiroyuki Nabae, Gen Endo, Koichi Suzumori
In addition to cylinders and vane motors, there is a McKibben artificial muscle that acts as a hydraulic actuator [3]. The artificial muscle consists of an inner rubber tube and an outer sleeve woven with fibers. The operation principle is that the inner rubber tube expands by applying hydraulic pressure inside the tube, causing the knitting angle of the outer sleeve to increase (details in Section 2.1). By these means, the artificial muscle contracts in the axial direction. Even though the artificial muscle is a very light weight and flexible structure, because the main material is rubber or fiber, it can generate a very strong force. In addition, an artificial muscle has essentially the same characteristics of a spring, as it presents a close linear relationship among contraction force, contraction ratio, and pressure. Therefore, the artificial muscle has a passive compliance without any active control. Owing to the characteristics such as lightness, flexibility, passive compliance, and the compressibility by air pressure, artificial muscles have often been used in machines related to human beings. In some studies, a high pressure due to water pressure or oil-hydraulic pressure has been applied to hydraulic artificial muscles (HAMs) [4–9].
PAM-SA hydrogel driving membrane with a cross-linked network structure for high stretchability
Published in Mechanics of Advanced Materials and Structures, 2023
Junyao Wang, Yansong Chen, Huan Liu, Tianhong Lang, Qi Hou, Rui Wang, Bowen Cui, Jingran Quan, Hongxu Pan, Hanbo Yang, Jianxin Xu, Yahao Liu
Artificial muscles, as an emerging synthetic actuator, can perform many functions of real muscles, such as flexion and contraction [1, 2]. Because of its advantages of good flexibility, no noise, and large deformation, it has a wide range of application prospects in the fields of biomedicine, artificial bionics, aerospace, and marine exploration [3–5]. Although there are numerous types of responses of artificial muscles, such as wet response, electrical response, temperature response, PH response, etc. [6–9]. However, compared with other types of artificial muscles, electro-responsive artificial muscles compose of electroactive polymers are more controllable and have become a hot spot for artificial muscle research [10, 11].