Electro-mechanical soft actuators with hetero-nanoarchitectured carbonaceous electrodes

Abstract

From the last decades, instead of conventional electromechanical actuators such as motors and pneumatic/hydraulic actuators, bio-inspired electroactive soft actuators have received particular interest as an indispensable unit in next-generation electronics such as human-friendly wearable electronics, and human-electronics interactive smart haptic systems, and biocompatible biomedical active-devices. However, as-developed electroactive soft actuators have not yet meet a tight requirement to be applied the next-generation electronics due to their challenging issues including robust operation in harsh conditions, low blocking force, slow response time, cost-effectiveness and high-resolution controllability. Here, various high-performance ionic actuators based on hetero-nanoarchitectured carbonaceous materials with improved electrical/electrochemical/mechanical properties of the electrodes have been presented to overcome the aforementioned issues of ionic type actuators. First, a high-performance air-working ionic polymer actuator using heteroatom-doped graphene electrodes has been suggested, exhibiting large bending strain of 0.36% under low input voltage of 1V and 18,000-cycle durability. Secondly, three-dimensional graphene-carbon nanotube-nickel heteronanstructures have been synthesized for powerful and soft artificial muscles. The artificial muscles exhibit three times larger bending deformation and 2.37 times higher blocking force after incorporating the heteronanostructures in both an ionic polymer and electrodes. Finally, crumpled sulfur-doped nickel cobalt selenide nanoarchitectures-grown on carbon cloth electrodes for high-strength artificial muscles have been developed. All researches as explained above have been conducted to approach the tight requirement for future applications. Therefore, these efforts will greatly contribute to realize practical applications in human friendly sensor/actuator-integrated smart systems, wearable soft electronics, touch-feedback soft devices, and even space-related systems.