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Abstract Soft electrothermal actuators have drawn extensive attention in recent years for their promising applications in biomimetic and biomedical areas. Most soft electrothermal actuators reported so far demonstrated uniform bending deformation, due to the deposition based fabrication of the conductive heater layer from nanomaterial-based solutions, which generally provides uniform heating capacity and uniform bending deformation. In this paper, a soft electrothermal actuator that can provide twisting deformation was designed and fabricated. A metallic microfilament heater of the soft twisting actuator was directly printed using electrohydrodynamic (EHD) printing, and embedded between two structural layers, a polyimide film and a polydimethylsiloxane layer, with distinct thermal expansion properties. Assisted by the direct patterning capabilities of EHD printing, a skewed heater pattern was designed and printed. This skewed heater pattern not only produces a skewed parallelogram-shaped temperature field, but also changes the stiffness anisotropy of the actuator, leading to twisting deformation with coupled bending. A theoretical kinematic model was built for the twisting actuator to describe its twisting deformation under different actuation effects. Based on that model, influence of design parameters on the twisting angle and motion trajectory of the twisting actuator were studied and validated by experiments. Finite element analysis was utilized for the thermal and deformation analysis of the actuator. The fabricated twisting actuator was characterized on its heating and twisting performance at different supply voltages. Using three twisting actuators, a soft gripper was designed and fabricated to implement pick-and-place operations of delicate objects.
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Electrothermal actuation of NEMS resonators: Modeling and experimental validation
We study the electrothermal actuation of nanomechanical motion using a combination of numerical simulations and analytical solutions. The nanoelectrothermal actuator structure is a u-shaped gold nanoresistor that is patterned on the anchor of a doubly clamped nanomechanical beam or a microcantilever resonator. This design has been used in recent experiments successfully. In our finite-element analysis (FEA) based model, our input is an ac current; we first calculate the temperature oscillations due to Joule heating using Ohm’s law and the heat equation; we then determine the thermally induced bending moment and the displacement profile of the beam by coupling the temperature field to Euler–Bernoulli beam theory with tension. Our model efficiently combines transient and frequency-domain analyses: we compute the temperature field using a transient approach and then impose this temperature field as a harmonic perturbation for determining the mechanical response in the frequency domain. This unique modeling method offers lower computational complexity and improved accuracy and is faster than a fully transient FEA approach. Our dynamical model computes the temperature and displacement fields in the time domain over a broad range of actuation frequencies and amplitudes. We validate the numerical results by directly comparing them with experimentally measured displacement amplitudes of nano-electro-mechanical system beams around their eigenmodes in vacuum. Our model predicts a thermal time constant of 1.9 ns in vacuum for our particular structures, indicating that electrothermal actuation is efficient up to ∼80 MHz. We also investigate the thermal response of the actuator when immersed in a variety of fluids.
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- PAR ID:
- 10481571
- Publisher / Repository:
- AIP
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Applied Physics
- Volume:
- 134
- Issue:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 0021-8979
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0157807
