Performance Characterization And Actuation Behavior Simulation Of Flexible Silicone Bsed Dielectric Elastomer Composites

Dielectric elastomer is a type of electro-active polymer materials that cantake place large actuation pressure and actuation strain under the electric field.For their fantastic and outstanding performances, there is a large potential fordielectric elastomer be applied in the electronic communication, informationengineering and biological medical fields. In special, their applicant in sensors,actuators and artificial muscles has been widely confirmed. The dielectric,mechanical and composite interface structure plays important roles on theactuation functionality of dielectric elastomer materials. In addition, thephysical and mathematical analysis to basic mechanism in actuation process isalso a critical focus for researching.In this paper, we use the novel route that different from the regularmethod of trying to increase the dielectric permittivity of composites. Bymeans of adding plasticizers with various contents into the TiO2/siliconesystem, we can modify the elastic modulus of composites and control theactuation performance successfully. The result shows that plasticizer candecrease the elastic modulus significantly. The composite with100Phr plasticizer exhibits the excellent results: the actuation sensitivity increase by550%, and the actuation strain increase by230%at such low electric field30V μm-1. Moreover, the mechanical and actuation performance of the plasticizedsilicone based composite is close to the3M VHB4910. In addition, we makea modification onto the surfaces of nano particles with different silanecoupling agents. After fabricating the composite and characterizing theperformances of the composites with different interface structures, the resultsexhibit that the interface structure can affect the functionality of dielectricelastomer composite significantly. KH550is an effective surface modifier anda little addition can obtain56%increase of the actuation sensitivity. Besides,we simulate the electro-mechanical instability in actuation processsuccessfully by the approach of electrostatic differential element method.Meanwhile, we revise the original actuation calculation. The experimentalresults demonstrate the revised calculation can give the more accuratedescription to the actuation behavior of dielectric elastomer composites.