Study On Response Characteristics Of Chitosan Gels Artificial Muscle

An electroactive polymer is a kind of smart material which can change their shape and size under the influence of an electric field. With the improvement of electro-active polymer properties, its research in the field of artificial muscle has become increasingly widespread.Electroactive polymer can be divided into two categories that are electronic polymers and ionic polymers, which have different actuation mechanism. The actuation prepared in this paper is kind of ionic actuators, the main component of the driven film is chitosan, and the main component of the electrode film is carbon nanotube. Compared with the electronic actuator, the ionic actuator has a lower driven voltage. However, the respond speed of the ionic actuator is much lower than the electronic actuator. This paper studied the improvement effect of the response performance by using the two methods of heat treatment and directly casting, meanwhile the effect discipline of using the genipin to crosslink the chitosan has been researched.Through experimental testing, it had been proved that the heat-treated actuators have better response performance than the non-heat treated actuators. Test by the way of short time,multiple times heat treatment to the actuator, it had been discovered that with the increase of the number of heat treatment, the response performance of the actuator continuous improved continuously. However, when the response performance reached to a certain extent, additional heat treatment can no longer improve the response performance of the actuator, what's more,with the extension of the heat treatment time, the response performance of the actuator began to drop. This shows that limited heat treatment can effectively improve the response performance of the actuator.In this experiment, the driven film and the electrode film is assembled by casting the driven film solution directly on the electrode film. It can be confinned by the SEM photo of the actuator that the fit between the driven film and the electrode film is enhanced by the process of casting. And the good fit between the films can reduce the contact resistance, after the test to the conductivity of the actuator, it had been found that this process can improve the conductivity of the actuators. The experiment to the response performance of the actuator shown that the actuators which made by casting process have better response performance compared with that made by traditional process.In this experiment of probing the influence discipline of the crosslinked driven film to the actuator response performance, after comparing the response performance of the actuators crosslinked by different genipin concentration, it had been found that non-crosslinked actuator had large response speed in the beginning, as the time went by, the reponse speed decreased quickly, the stability of actuator is not good; meanwhile, the speed of the actuator crosslinked by low genipin concentration equals to the non-crosslinked actuator, but its speed had no decrease as the time increasing; however, the speed of the actuators crosslinked by high genipin concentration are far lower than the non-crosslinked or low-crosslinked ones. It reveals that low genipin concentration has good influence to the response performance and the speed stability of the actuators, while the high concentration genipin decreases the response speed of the actuators.