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Updated: Aug 14, 2025
Fabrication Process of Silicone-based Dielectric Elastomer Actuators
Published on: February 1, 2016
On the understanding of dielectric elastomer and its application for all-soft artificial heart
Wenjie Wu1, Shuangkun Zhang2, Zhanpeng Wu2
1Center of Advanced Elastomer Materials, State Key Laboratory of Organic-Inorganic Composites, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing 100029, China; Engineering Research Center of Ministry of Education on Energy and Resource Saved Elastomers, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing 100029, China; Beijing Laboratory of Biomedical Materials, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing 100029, China.
Abstract:
Although dielectric elastomer (DE) with substantial actuated strain (AS) has been reported 20 years ago, its scientific understanding remains unclear. The most accepted theory of DE, which is proposed in 2000, holds the view that AS of DE is induced by the Maxwell stress. According to this theory, materials have similar ratios of permittivity and Young's modulus should have similar AS, while the experimental results are on contrary to this theory, and the experimental AS has no relationship with ideal AS. Here, a new dipole-conformation-actuated strain cross-scale model is proposed, which can be generally applied to explain the AS of DE without pre-strain. According to this model, several characteristics of an ideal DE are listed in this work and a new DE based on polyphosphazene (PPZ) is synthesized. The AS of PPZ can reach 84% without any pre-strain. At last, a PPZ-based all soft artificial heart (ASAH) is built, which works in the similar way with natural myocardium, indicating that this material has great application potential and possibility in the construction of an ASAH for heart failure (HF) patients.
