A new kind of electro-active polymer composite composed of silicone elastomer and.docx

A new kind of electro-active polymer composite composed of silicone elastomer and polyethylene glycol Haoliang Liu,1 Liqun Zhang,1,2 Dan Yang,1 Yingchun Yu,1 and Ming Tian1,2* 1Key Laboratory of the Preparation and Processing of Novel Polymer Materials, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing, China 100029 2State Key Laboratory of Organic-Inorganic Composites, Ministry of Science and Technology, Beijing, China 100029 Address: Beijing University of Chemical Technology, NO.15 Of North Three-ring East Road, Chao Yang District, BEIJING, CHINA Email: tian71402@126.com; HYPERLINK mailto:ilovetbag@163.com ilovetbag@163.com Abstract A new kind of electro-active polymer composite composed of silicone and polyethylene glycol (PEG) was fabricated by solution blending. 2, 5 and 8 phr(refer to per 100 gram rubber) PEG with average molecular weight of 600(PEG600) and 1500(PEG1500 ) were added to liquid silicone(DC3481) separately. The dielectric, electrical, mechanical, and electromechanical properties were tested. The silicone/PEG600 composite shows an increased dielectric constant and decreased Young modulus, resulting in an improved figure of merit(FOM) and an actuation strain of 9.5% at 35V/μm was achieved which is 80% higher than the pure silicone. So PEG600 has provided good improvement of the actuation properties, and it has good value in DEA study. However the silicone/PEG1500 composite shows a much higher dielectric constant, and an increased modulus because of its semi-crystalline structure, resulting in a decreased FOM, so the actuation strain was smaller than the pure silicone. Besides these experiment tests, an analysis was made through a comparison of theoretical strain and experiment value, indicating that not only the FOM, but the dielectric loss and mechanical loss influence the actuation properties. Introduction Electro-active polymers (EAPs) inherently capable of converting electrical energy to mechanical work via large voltage-controlled cha