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An electrical model with equivalent elements in a time-variant environment for an ionic-polymer-metal-composite system

  • Special Issue: Soft Robotics
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Abstract

Ionic polymer metal composite (IPMC) is a kind of ionic electroactive polymer (EAP) smart material that can exhibit conspicuous deflection with low external voltages (~ 5 V). It can be cut in various sizes and shapes, and used and applied in robots and artificial muscles with the capability in aquatic operation. An IPMC strip can be modeled as a cantilever beam with a loading distribution on the surface. Nevertheless, the loading distribution is non-uniform due to the imperfect surface conductivity that causes four different imaginary loading distributions employed in our structural model. The difference can be up to 5 times (3:8 mm to 19 mm). In this paper, a novel linear time-variant (LTV) model is introduced and applied to model an IPMC system. This modeling method is different from previous linear time-invariant (LTI) models because the internal environment of IPMC may be unsteady due to mobile cations with water molecules. In addition, the influence of surface conductivity is simulated and proven based on this model. Finally, by applying this novel modeling method, hysteresis that exists in IPMC and affects the relationship between the output deflection and the corresponding input voltage, such as 0:1-, 0:2-, and 0:3-rad/s sinusoidal waves, has been shown and simulated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University, 3123 TAMU, College Station, TX, 77843-3123, USA

    Yi-chu Chang & Won-jong Kim

Authors
  1. Yi-chu Chang
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  2. Won-jong Kim
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Correspondence to Yi-chu Chang.

Additional information

Recommended by Guest Editor Sungwan Kim. The authors thank Prof. James Batteas and his students, Dr. Yang Chan and Dr. Albert Wan in the Department of Chemistry, Texas A&M University for providing with facilities and instruction for manufacturing the IPMC samples.

Yi-chu Chang received the B.S. amd M.S. degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, in 2003 and 2005, respectively. In 2013, he received his Ph.D. degree in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University (TAMU), College Station. He had worked as a Postdoctoral researcher at Texas A&M University. Since 2014, he has been an automation engineer with the Department of Automation at Miller-Eads, Co., Inc, in Indianapolis, IN. His research interests include robotics design and control, applications of IPMC, real-time systems, and advanced robotics.

Won-jong Kim received the B.S. (summa cum laude) and M.S. degrees in control and instrumentation engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1989 and 1991, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, in 1997. Since 2000, he has been with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University (TAMU), College Station, where currently he is Associate Professor. He is the holder of three U.S. patents on precision positioning systems. He is Fellow of ASME, Senior Member of IEEE, and Member of Pi Tau Sigma. Prof. Kim is Associate Editor of International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems, and Asian Journal of Control, and was Associate Editor of ASME Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement and Control and Technical Editor of IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics.

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Chang, Yc., Kim, Wj. An electrical model with equivalent elements in a time-variant environment for an ionic-polymer-metal-composite system. Int. J. Control Autom. Syst. 15, 45–53 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-016-0460-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-016-0460-5

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