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Highly bendable ionic electroactive polymer actuator based on carboxylated bacterial cellulose by doping with MWCNT

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Abstract

Human-friendly electronic devices including medical active devices, soft haptic devices, artificial muscle, and wearable electronics, will require the use of high-performance soft actuators with bio-friendly property, large bending deformation, and low actuation voltage. Herein, we report a novel ionic electroactive actuator based on carboxylated bacterial cellulose (CBC), ionic liquid (IL), multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT), and PEDOT: PSS electrodes. The designed actuator displayed superior electro-chemo-mechanical properties due to its ionic crosslinking structure formed by the strong ionic interactions among CBC, MWCNT, and IL. Specifically, the actuator demonstrated large bending strain (8.2 mm under 1.0 V sinusoidal input voltage at 0.1 Hz), low actuation voltage (< 2 V), excellent actuation durability (95% retention in 2 h), high Young's modulus (349.1 MPa), and specific capacitance (76.97 mF cm–2). More importantly, the artificial soft robotic fingers using the CBC-IL-MWCNT actuators were successfully realized. Therefore, the designed actuator will promote the advancement of artificial muscles, soft haptic devices, biomimetic robots, soft robots, wearable devices, and tactile devices.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51905487) and Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (Grant No. LY21E050023 and LTY21F030001).

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  1. Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou, 310018, China

    Fan Wang, Lei Wang, Yaofeng Wang & Donghai Wang

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  1. Fan Wang
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FW: writing- original draft & editing, Funding acquisition. LW: analyzing data. YFW: analyzing data. DW: writing—review & editing.

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Correspondence to Fan Wang or Donghai Wang.

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Wang, F., Wang, L., Wang, Y. et al. Highly bendable ionic electroactive polymer actuator based on carboxylated bacterial cellulose by doping with MWCNT. Appl. Phys. A 128, 911 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-022-06052-4

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