Experiments and Analysis of Cylindrical Dielectric Elastomer Actuators

In order to obtain a kind of compact dielectric elastomer actuator,a cylindrical actuator is designed and manufactured using VHB4910 as the actuating material.In the contrastive experiments,the maximum displacement of 8.5 mm can be achieved,and the elongation strain of active area is up to 18.89%(the active length of actuator is 45 mm).Yeoh hyperelastic model is used for finite element simulation of the actuator,and a displacement of 6.24 mm is calculated.The simulation result agrees well with experiments,and the reason of deviation is analyzed.Research on cylindrical dielectric elastomer actuator will provide an instruction for the design,analysis and implementation of this kind of actuator.