Research On Hydrogel Soft Actuator Based On 3D Printing

Intelligent materials that can respond to environmental stimuli such as temperature,humidity,electric field,magnetic field and pH have attracted much attention in the field of soft robots and artificial muscles.Among them,Intelligent hydrogel materials can swell or shrink under the stimulation of external environment(such as temperature,humidity,electric field,magnetic field,pH,light).They have the advantages of good environmental compatibility,easy to drive and good biocompatibility.They have been widely used in the field of soft robots.In the field of intelligent hydrogel soft actuator research,hydrogel soft actuators are usually manufactured by mold casting,extrusion printing,and lithography pattern processing,and it is impossible to manufacture complex hydrogel soft actuators.In order to overcome this difficulty,this paper studies the hydrogel soft actuators based on photocuring 3D printing technology.Compared with the above processing technology,photocuring 3D printing is able to manufacture complex structures and has the advantages of faster speed of single printing and higher manufacturing precision.This paper uses electroactive hydrogel materials combined with photocuring 3D printing technology for soft actuator research.The mainly research of this paper are as follows: the research on the deformation mechanism of electroactive hydrogel,the preparation and characterization of electroactive hydrogel materials,the photocuring 3D printing of hydrogel materials,the design and experiments of electroactive hydrogel soft actuators.And the conclusions are as follows:(1)The deformation mechanism of electroactive hydrogels was analyzed in this paper,and a polyethylene glycol diacrylate/polyacrylic acid copolymer hydrogel which can be applied to photocuring 3D printing was prepared.At the same time,a hydrogel photocuring 3D printing system was built,and the computer control software applied to the hydrogel photocuring 3D printing system was developed.Based on this,the electroactive hydrogel photocuring 3D printing process parameters were determined by experiments.Studies have shown that electroactive hydrogel 3D printing can manufacture complex structure with high manufacturing speed and high manufacturing precision.(2)Experimentally measuring the characteristics of the electroactive hydrogel's swelling rate and water content.The water content of the electroactive hydrogel swelled in sodium phosphate solution can reach more than 80%.Besides,its swelling rate is up to about 300%.In addition,the electroactive 3D printing system was used to print the electroactive hydrogel samples,and the electrical response characteristics of electroactive hydrogel were studied from the aspects of material ratio,electrolyte solution concentration,sample thickness and voltage amplitude applied by the electrolyte solution.The slim electroactive hydrogel samples have faster response speed and its bending and response speeds increase with increasing voltage.(3)Based on the deformation characteristics of the electroactive hydrogel,photocuring 3D printing system was used to design and fabricate a fish tail-like flexible actuator,a propulsion actuator,and an electrically responsive hydrogel flexible gripper.Experiments show that the electroactive hydrogel actuator has good driving performance and is able to applied in the file of soft robots.At the same time,the rapid manufacturing of the actuators can be realized by using the photocuring 3D printing system.