Novel motion-producing
devices — actuators,
motors, generators —
I t’s only a $100 toy— an aquarium of swimming robotic fish developed by
the Eamex Corporation in Osaka, Japan. What makes it remarkable is that
the brightly colored plastic fish propelling themselves through the water in
a fair imitation of life do not contain mechanical parts: no motors, no drive
shafts, no gears, not even a battery. Instead the fish swim because their plastic
based on polymers that innards flex back and forth, seemingly of their own volition. They are the first
change shape when commercial products based on a new generation of improved electroactive poly-
mers (EAPs), plastics that move in response to electricity.
stimulated electrically For decades, engineers who build actuators, or motion-generating devices,
have sought an artificial equivalent of muscle. Simply by changing their length
are nearing in response to nerve stimulation, muscles can exert controlled amounts of force
commercialization sufficient to blink an eyelid or hoist a barbell. Muscles also exhibit the proper-
ty of scale invariance: their mechanism works equally efficiently at all sizes,
which is why fundamentally the same muscle tissue powers both insects and ele-
phants. Something like muscle might therefore be useful in driving devices for
which building tiny electric motors is not easily accomplished.
EAPs hold promise for becoming the artificial muscles of the future. Inves-
tigators are already ambitiously working on EAP-based alternatives to many
of today’s technologies. And they aren’t afraid to pit their creations against na-
ture’s. A few years ago several individuals, including Yoseph Bar-Cohen, a se-
nior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.,
posted a challenge to the electroactive polymer research community to drum up
interest in the field: a race to build the first EAP-driven robotic arm that could
beat a human arm-wrestler one on one. Later, they began searching for spon-
sors to subsidize a cash prize for the winner.
Perhaps the most promising of the current EAP efforts is being conducted
by SRI International, a nonprofit contract-research laboratory based in Men-
lo Park, Calif. Within a few months, SRI management hopes to complete ar-
ranging the initial $4 million to $6 million in investment funding needed to
launch a spin-off company— tentatively called Artificial Muscle Incorporated—
to commercialize the EAP technology it has patented. Even now, SRI is work-
ing on half a dozen R&D contracts with the U.S. government and companies
Dielectric
elastomer film
Compliant electrodes Area expansion
in the toy, automotive, electronics, med- the kind of thing you could pick up in find something that did.” Within a few
ical product and footwear industries to hardware stores.” years Bar-Cohen had learned enough to
bring artificial muscles to market. help establish the first scientific conference
The start-up firm’s goal? Only to re- Materials That Move on the topic, start publishing an EAP
place a substantial number of the myriad BAR-COHEN HAS SERVED as the un- newsletter, post an EAP Web site and edit
electric motors we use regularly, not to official coordinator for the highly diverse two books on the nascent technology.
mention many other common motion- community of international EAP re- Sitting among arrays of lab tables
generating mechanisms, with smaller, searchers since the mid-1990s. Back dur- strewn with prototype actuation devices
lighter, cheaper products using SRI’s ing the field’s infancy, “the electroactive and test apparatus in a low-slung research
novel actuators. “We believe this tech- polymer materials I read about in scien- building on the JPL campus, Bar-Cohen
nology has a good chance to revolution- tific papers didn’t work as advertised,” he reviews the history of the field he has
ize the field of mechanical actuation,” recalls, chuckling slyly. “And as I already come to know so well. “For a long time,”
states Phillip von Guggenberg, the lab’s had obtained NASA funding to study the he begins, “people have been working on
JAMIE KRIPKE (preceding pages); SARA CHEN (above and opposite page)
director of business development. “We’d technology, I was forced to look around ways to move objects without electric mo-
like to make the technology ubiquitous, to find who was working in this area to tors, which can be too heavy and bulky
for many applications. Until the develop-
Overview/Electroactive Polymers ment of EAPs, the standard replacement
technology for motors were piezoelectric
■ Physicists and chemists have long sought to develop lightweight materials ceramics, which have been around for
that grow or shrink significantly in length or volume when subjected to electric some time.”
stimulation. Such substances could serve as the drivers for novel motion- In piezoelectric materials, mechanical
generating devices (generally called actuators)— possible replacements for stress causes crystals to electrically polar-
the ubiquitous electric motor, which is often too bulky and heavy for smaller- ize and vice versa. Hit them with electric
scale applications. current and they deform; deform them
■ A new generation of electroactive polymer materials displays sufficient and they generate electricity.
physical response to electrical excitation to power new classes of actuators Bar-Cohen lifts a small grayish disk off
as well as innovative sensors and energy generators. Products based on this one of the lab benches, saying, “This one’s
“artificial muscle” technology are just starting to hit the market. made of PZT— lead zirconate titanate.”
He explains that electric current makes the
10 level, electrolysis takes place, which caus- Scheinbeim of Rutgers University. The
Natural
muscles es irreversible damage to the material.” hydrocarbon molecules in those polymers
In contrast, electronic EAPs (such as are arranged in semicrystalline arrays fea-
1
Magnetic
ferroelectric polymers, electrets, dielectric turing piezoelectriclike properties.
actuators elastomers and electrostrictive graft elas- When exposed to an electric field, all
Piezoelectric and
0.1 magnetostrictive tomers) are driven by electric fields. They insulating plastics, such as polyurethane,
actuators require relatively high voltages, which contract in the direction of the field lines
0.01 can cause uncomfortable electric shocks. and expand perpendicularly to them. This
0.01 0.1 1 10 100 But in return, electronic EAPs can react phenomenon, which differs from elec-
Actuation Pressure/Density quickly and deliver strong mechanical trostriction, is called Maxwell stress. “It
(kilopascals-meters3/kilogram)
forces. They do not need a protective had been known for a long time but was
coating and require almost no current to regarded generally as a nuisance effect,”
piezoelectric PZT shrink and expand by hold a position. Pelrine says.
a fraction of a percent of its total length. SRI’s artificial muscle material falls He recognized that polymers softer
Not much motion but useful nonetheless. into the electronic EAP classification. The than polyurethane would squash more
In an adjoining room, Bar-Cohen long, bumpy and sometimes serendipi- under electrostatic attraction and thus
shows off foot-long impact drills driven tous road to its successful development is would provide greater mechanical strains.
by PZT disks that he is building with his a classic example of the vagaries of tech- Working with soft silicones, the SRI sci-
JPL colleagues and Cybersonics. “Inside nological innovation. entists soon demonstrated quite accept-
this cylinder is a stack of piezoelectric able strains of 10 to 15 percent. With fur-
disks,” he states. “When activated with al- Electrifying Rubber ther research those numbers rose to 20 to
ternating current, the stack beats ultrason- “ S R I I N T E R N A T I O N A L began work on 30 percent. To distinguish the new actu-
ically on a mass that hops up and down at artificial muscles in 1992 under contract ator materials, silicones and other softer
a high rate, driving a bit into solid rock.” to the Japanese micro-machine program,” plastics were christened dielectric elas-
To one side sit piles of stone blocks into
which drill bits have cut deep holes.
As a demonstration of how effective-
ly piezoceramics can perform as actua-
tors, it is impressive. But many applica-
tions would demand electroactive mate-
rials that grow by more than just a
fraction of a percent.
Electrode-coated
polymer film
Helical
spring
even different polymers. As Pei says, to the point at which the electric field that produces moderate, 5 to 10 percent
“This is a device, not a material.” Ac- breaks down and current flows across the strains for 10 million cycles.” Another
cording to Pelrine, the team can produce gap [between the electrodes], more volt- generated 50 percent area strains for a
the actuation effect using various poly- age gives you greater expansion and million cycles.
mers, including acrylics and silicones. greater force,” Pelrine says. Although artificial-muscle technology
Even natural rubber works to some ex- “High voltage can be a concern,” can weigh significantly less than compa-
tent. In the extreme temperatures of out- Kornbluh comments, “but it’s not neces- rable electric motors—the polymers them-
er space, for example, artificial muscles sarily dangerous. After all, fluorescent selves have the density of water— efforts
might best be made of silicone plastics, lights and cathode-ray tubes are high- are ongoing at SRI to cut their mass by re-
which have been demonstrated in a vacu- voltage devices, but nobody worries about ducing the need for the external structure
um at –100 degrees Celsius. Uses that re- them. It’s more of an issue for mobile de- that prestrain the polymers. Pei, for in-
quire larger output forces might involve vices because batteries are usually low- stance, is experimenting with chemical
perceptible. By coating the thin-film belt. Such sensors could similarly be in-
sheets and patterned compliant corporated in fabrics and other materials
electrodes with a much thicker and Dielectric
polymer as fibers, strips or coatings, he says.
softer layer of polymeric gel, however, Surface texturing and smart surfaces.
thickness changes can be greatly Voltage on
V If the polymers are imprinted with pat-
amplified so that they are readily terns of electrodes, arrays of dots or
apparent. As the film grows in the shapes can be raised on a surface on de-
plane, the gel spreads out along with mand. This technology might find use as
the expanding film and bunches up at an active camouflage fabric that can
the points at which the film Enhanced
bulge change its reflectance as desired or as a
compresses. mechanism for making “riblets” that im-
prove the aerodynamic drag characteris-
Uncompressed
Rigid grid Compressed
plate
Electrode-coated
polymer film
Compliant
material
Bellows
Rigid base plate
tics of airplane wings [see illustration on to efficient, extremely small generators in by the progress the SRI group has made
preceding page]. the centimeter-or-less size range. on its actuator technology. But success
Power generators. Again, because But truly marketable products are still has also created problems in one regard:
these materials act as soft capacitors, vari- to come. “At this point we’re building the arm-wrestling challenge. “We expect-
able-capacitance power generators and turnkey devices that we can place in the ed it would take 20 years or so for anyone
energy harvesters can be built from them. hands of engineers so they can play with to develop a mechanical arm that would
DARPA and the U.S. Army funded devel- them and get comfortable with the tech- be strong enough to compete against a
opment of a heel-strike generator, a port- nology,” von Guggenberg notes. “We human,” he laughs. “Now SRI says they’re
able energy source that soldiers and oth- hope it’s just a matter of time before every ready to build one, and we haven’t raised
ers in the field could use to power elec- engineer will consider this technology as the prize money yet!”
tronic devices in place of batteries. An they design new products.”
average-size person taking a step each sec- Bar-Cohen says that he is impressed Steven Ashley is a staff writer and editor.
ond can produce about a watt of power
using a device now under development MORE TO E XPLORE
[see illustration above]. Von Guggenberg High-Speed Electrically Actuated Elastomers with Over 100% Strain. Ron Pelrine, Roy Kornbluh,
says this concept has caught the interest of Qibing Pei and Jose Joseph in Science, Vol. 287, pages 836–839; February 4, 2000.
SARA CHEN (illustrations); JAMIE KRIPKE (photograph)
Electroactive Polymer (EAP) Actuators as Artificial Muscles: Reality, Potential, and Challenges.
footwear companies. The devices could Edited by Yoseph Bar-Cohen. SPIE Press Monograph, Vol. PM98; 2001.
similarly be attached to backpack straps Polymer Actuators. Peter Sommer-Larsen and Roy Kornbluh in Proceedings of Actuator 2002.
or car-suspension components. In princi- 8th International Conference on New Actuators, Bremen, Germany; June 2002.
ple, this approach could also be applied to An All-Organic Composite Actuator Material with High Dielectric Constant. Q. M. Zhang et al.
wave generators or wind-power devices. in Nature, Vol. 419, pages 284–287; September 19, 2002.
Engineering a Muscle: An Approach to Artificial Muscle Based on Field-Activated Electroactive
SRI researchers recently tested a more Polymers. Roy Kornbluh et al. in Neurotechnology for Biomimetic Robots. Edited by Joseph Ayers,
radical concept—“polymer engines.” Pro- Joel Davis and Alan Rudolph. MIT Press, 2002.
pane fuel was burned inside a chamber, Smart Structures and Materials 2003: Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices (EAPAD).
and the pressure from the resulting com- Edited by Yoseph Bar-Cohen. Proceedings of the SPIE, Vol. 5051; 2003.
Simple muscle demos are available online at www.erg.sri.com/projects/muscle/recipe and
bustion products distorted a dielectric ndeaa.jpl.nasa.gov/nasa-nde/lommas/eap/EAP-recipe.htm
elastomer diaphragm, generating elec- The WorldWide ElectroActive Polymer Newsletter is at
tricity. Such designs might eventually lead ndeaa.jpl.nasa.gov/nasa-nde/lommas/eap/WW-EAP-Newsletter.html