Evaluation of Dielectric Gel Coating for Encapsulation of Ionic Polymer-Metal Composite (IPMC) Actuators

João Carlos Pires; João Paulo Serrano da; Paulo José da Costa Branco

Informações chave

Autores:

João Carlos Pires (João Carlos Pires Barrambana); João Paulo Serrano da (João Paulo Serrano da Silva); Paulo José da Costa Branco (Paulo José da Costa Branco)

Publicado em

Novembro 2007

Resumo

Ionic polymer?metal composites (IPMCs) need ionic hydration to operate. Being water the most used solvent, it happens that during the IPMC air operational life it will eventually dry. With the objective of producing an air-operable IPMC actuator, a new encapsulation process using a dielectric gel is proposed in this paper. We describe the encapsulation procedure and a set of experiments that were performed to verify the evolution of electrical and mechanical IPMC characteristics after 1 day, 1 week, and after 20 days of encapsulation. The results show that the encapsulated IPMC remained hydrated and its performance maintained, indicating the potentiality of the dielectric gel as an IPMC encapsulant material.