Effect of pre-strain on the antagonistically driven dielectric polymer actuator

Many publications have demonstrated advantages of smart polymer actuators over the traditional electromagnetic transducers. One of the most significant contributions of the polymers might be their soft actuation mechanism. Hence unlike the traditional actuators, there is morphological freedom for actuator construction that benefits production of either small scale complex mechanisms or human-like applications. Although many different actuation paradigms of polymer actuators presented in previous publications, no significant contributions are made for the actual industrial applications. A noble idea for acquiring controllable actuation is antagonistic drive mechanism of dielectric elastomer. The mechanism provides fairly accurate controllable motion and relatively large actuation forces. A strong dependency to pre-strain of the polymer is however one of the major constraints of the actuator driving mechanism. A detailed characterization of pre-strain effects should be done for the successful construction of the actuators. Hence an experimental and theoretical consideration about mutual effects of pre-strain and actuator performance is to be presented in the present work.