Polymer artificial muscles

By T. Mirfakhrai, John D. W. Madden, R. Baughman. 2007

776 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The various types of natural muscle are incredible material systems that enable the production of large deformations by repetitive molecular motions. Polymer artificial muscle technologies are being developed that produce similar strains and higher stresses using electrostatic forces, electrostriction, ion insertion, and molecular conformational changes. Materials used include elastomers, conducting polymers, ionically conducting polymers, and carbon nanotubes. The mechanisms, performance, and remaining challenges associated with these technologies are described. Initial applications are being developed, but further work by the materials community should help make these technologies applicable in a wide range of devices where muscle-like motion is desirable.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dfe9be3b4e9d8eda354ca13e24b02562b6bf8682

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Polymers and Plastics

Citations in the corpus

Increasing the performance of dielectric elastomer actuators: A review from the materials perspective (2015, background): “Introduction Electro-active polymers (EAPs) that respond to an electrical field by changing their shape have the potential to mimic muscle-like behaviour enabling the development of lightweight, energy efficient and silent actuators, motors and force and strain sensors [1, 2].”
Soft Robotics: New Perspectives for Robot Bodyware and Control (2014, neutral): “Most of them are based on polymeric matrices activated with different mechanisms, but they are all endowed with the capability of varying their size and shape when an electric stimulus is supplied (Mirfakhrai et al., 2007).”