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Constitutive equations for an electroactive polymer

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Abstract

Ionic electroactive polymers can be used as sensors or actuators. For this purpose, a thin film of polyelectrolyte is saturated with a solvent and sandwiched between two platinum electrodes. The solvent causes a complete dissociation of the polymer and the release of small cations. The application of an electric field across the thickness results in the bending of the strip and vice versa. The material is modeled by a two-phase continuous medium. The solid phase, constituted by the polymer backbone inlaid with anions, is depicted as a deformable porous media. The liquid phase is composed of the free cations and the solvent (usually water). We used a coarse grain model. The conservation laws of this system have been established in a previous work. The entropy balance law and the thermodynamic relations are first written for each phase and then for the complete material using a statistical average technique and the material derivative concept. One deduces the entropy production. Identifying generalized forces and fluxes provides the constitutive equations of the whole system: the stress–strain relations which satisfy a Kelvin–Voigt model, generalized Fourier’s and Darcy’s laws and the Nernst–Planck equation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Département de Sciences Physiques, U.F.R. des Sciences, Université de Versailles Saint Quentin, 45, avenue des Etats-Unis, 78035, Versailles, France

    Mireille Tixier

  2. Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ. Paris 06, UMR 7190, Institut Jean le Rond d’Alembert, 75005, Paris, France

    Joël Pouget

  3. CNRS, UMR 7190, Institut Jean le Rond d’Alembert, 75005, Paris, France

    Joël Pouget

Authors
  1. Mireille Tixier
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  2. Joël Pouget
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Correspondence to Mireille Tixier.

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Communicated by Andreas Öchsner.

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Tixier, M., Pouget, J. Constitutive equations for an electroactive polymer. Continuum Mech. Thermodyn. 28, 1071–1091 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00161-015-0463-0

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