Silicone Material With Enhanced Permittivity Used for Dielectric Elastomer Transducers

Abstract

Silicone materials are very appropriate for dielectric elastomer (DE) transducer applications due to their distinguished mechanical and electrical characteristics like high elasticity and an efficient electromechanical behavior. Since the material parameter permittivity influences significantly the work output, Wacker Chemie AG developed a new silicone named ELASTOSIL® Film 5030 with increased permittivity for improving the work output. Within this contribution, the mechanical characteristics including the hyperelasticity and electromechanically coupled behavior is compared to standard silicone material ELASTOSIL® Film 2030 from Wacker Young’s modulus of both materials are obtained conducting tensile tests, while the electromechanical behavior is characterized by investigating a planar single layer DE transducer. The new material has a similar Young’s modulus compared to the standard material. Furthermore, the electrically actuated deformation of the planar single layer DE transducers made form new silicone is proportional larger to its permittivity and inversely proportional to its Young’s modulus under same electrical field applied.

In Situ Alignment of Bacterial Cellulose Using Wrinkling

“…The conventional wrinkling process employs the usage of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) as the elastomeric substrate wherein wrinkles are formed in the direction perpendicular to the applied strain . In this research, we employ a thin silicone film, a high-precision silicone film synthesized from silicone rubber via cross-linking. , This film is preferred in this research for upscaling the bacterial synthesis process wherein meter-square wrinkled substrates are used instead of the square-centimeter wrinkled substrates usually applied in the laboratory scale. Figure a (i) illustrates the preparation of wrinkles on a thin silicone film, which is detailed in Section .…”