Electroactive Polymers In Automotive Applications

During the development of today’s passenger cars,engineers and vehicle designers face an area of tension between three different poles,which are safety,driving experience and efficiency.Optimizing a vehicle design for the benefit of one of these three goals usually results in disadvantages for one or both other areas of constraint.Considering the current challenges the automotive industry has to face,e.g.legislative regulations concerning vehicle efficiency and safety as well as increasing customer demands,it is crucial to find new solutions to master the area of tension explained above.Material science and intelligent mechatronics can be one of these.This thesis shall give an overview how the material group of electroactive polymers(EAPs)and the new design possibilities they bring along may enhance driving safety,experience and efficiency.First of all,the material group of electroactive polymers,their actuation principles and typical production processes will be introduced.Subsequently,application examples for EAPs from different vehicle domains and of various maturity stages will be presented.Their main purpose is related to one or a combination of the three fields explained above.In the next step,the technical competitiveness of this new technology against other actuation technologies applicable in the vehicle shall be investigated by carrying out a benchmark process specially designed for this purpose.The analyzed competing technologies comprise piezoelectric,electro-mechanic and fluid-powered systems.Within this process,which is based on performance figures found in research and industry publications,each actuation technology is evaluated according to different criteria such as power density or actuation accuracy using a special algorithm.These criteria are then related to different application examples within the automobile by using different means of weighting to identify the most suitable actuation technology for each use case.In the last chapter general facts about the worldwide EAP market will be explained.Concluding,the readiness and importance of the electroactive polymer technology for automotive series production shall be summarized and an outlook will be given.