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Updated: Aug 6, 2025

Fabrication Process of Silicone-based Dielectric Elastomer Actuators
Published on: February 1, 2016
Polyvinyl chloride-based dielectric elastomer with high permittivity and low viscoelasticity for actuation and
Jianjian Huang1, Xiaodie Zhang1, Ruixue Liu1
1State Laboratory of Surface & Interface, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry, Zhengzhou, 450002, China.
Abstract:
Dielectric elastomers (DEs) are widely used in soft actuation and sensing. Current DE actuators require high driving electrical fields because of their low permittivity. Most of DE actuators and sensors suffer from high viscoelastic effects, leading to high mechanical loss and large shifts of signals. This study demonstrates a valuable strategy to produce polyvinyl chloride (PVC)-based elastomers with high permittivity and low viscoelasticity. The introduction of cyanoethyl cellulose (CEC) into plasticized PVC gel (PVCg) not only confers a high dielectric permittivity (18.9@1 kHz) but also significantly mitigates their viscoelastic effects with a low mechanical loss (0.04@1 Hz). The CEC/PVCg actuators demonstrate higher actuation performances over the existing DE actuators under low electrical fields and show marginal displacement shifts (7.78%) compared to VHB 4910 (136.09%). The CEC/PVCg sensors display high sensitivity, fast response, and limited signal drifts, enabling their faithful monitoring of multiple human motions.
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