Preparation And Actuation Properties Of Natural Polymer Gel Artificial Muscle

As an electroactive polymer,ionic gel actuator is capable of producing significant size and shape changes under low voltage excitation,and has become a hot research topic for flexible microactuators.Some of the polymers and crosslinkers used in conventional ionic gel electroactuators have problems of high toxicity and poor biocompatibility.Chitosan and cellulose are both natural polymer compounds with abundant storage in nature,which have the advantages of simple and easy to obtain,low price,good biocompatibility,non-toxic and non-polluting and degradable,etc.Therefore,the artificial muscle of natural polymer gel manufactured by using this material extracted from natural substances has important research value.In this paper,artificial muscle samples are prepared by cross-linking two natural polymers based on natural polymer materials,and the effect of cross-linking ratio on the output force properties of artificial muscle samples is investigated.In response to the defects of the existing hot pressing process method,a water mist bonding process for achieving the assembly of electrode film and electroactuated film is proposed.The main research work of this paper includes the following two aspects:(1)A natural polymer gel artificial muscle composed of sodium carboxymethyl cellulose and carboxylated chitosan as polymers is proposed,and artificial muscles with different cross-linked mass ratios are prepared and experiments on output force characteristics are conducted.In order to investigate the effect of cross-linked mass ratio on the response speed of the artificial muscle,the artificial muscles with different cross-linked mass ratios are tested and analyzed by four aspects:microstructure,mechanical properties,porosity,and electrochemical properties.The experimental results show that the best cross-linked mass ratio is 4:4,the surface microscopic void structure is uniformly distributed,the porosity is 18.5%,the elastic modulus is 2.73MPa,the specific capacitance is 0.23 m F/cm~2,and the response speed is 0.115 m N/s,which is more than 15 times higher than the response speed of artificial muscle made by cross-linking sodium alginate and chitosan.(2)An water mist bonding method is proposed for the preparation of gel artificial muscles.The main use of the water-mist bonding method is to realize the assembly of electrode membrane and electrolyte membrane,and the actuation performance of the artificial muscle can be further enhanced by changing the process parameters during the assembly process.In this paper,experiments on the mechanical,electrical,and actuation properties are conducted to investigate the effects of the water mist bonding process parameters on the artificial muscle.In addition,the deformation performance of the artificial muscle reached a maximum of 39.6°at a humidification time of 3 min.In conclusion,the water mist bonding process proposed in this paper does not require complex equipment,has the feature of optimizing the actuation performance of artificial muscles,and improves the problem of poor inter-film contact in the hot pressing process.