Refine
Has Fulltext
- no (9)
Year of publication
- 2007 (9) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (9)
Language
- English (9) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (9)
Institute
An approach for creating complex structures with embedded actuation in planar manufacturing steps is presented. Self-organization and energy minimization are central to this approach, illustrated with a model based on minimization of the hyperelastic free energy strain function of a stretched elastomer and the bending elastic energy of a plastic frame. A tulip-shaped gripper structure illustrates the technological potential of the approach. Advantages are simplicity of manufacture, complexity of final structures, and the ease with which any electroactive material can be exploited as means of actuation. (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics.
Spectroscopic study of dielectric barrier discharges in cellular polypropylene ferroelectrets
(2007)
The transient light emission from the dielectric barrier discharges (DBDs) in cellular polypropylene ferroelectrets subjected to high electric poling fields was spectroscopically measured. The spectrum shows strong emission from the second positive system of molecular nitrogen, N-2(C (3)Pi(u))-> N-2(B (3)Pi(g)), and the first negative system of N-2(+), N-2(+)(B (2)Sigma(+)(u))-> N-2(+)(X (2)Sigma(+)(g)), consistent with a DBD in air. When a dc voltage is applied stepwise to the ferroelectret film, light emission starts above a threshold, coinciding with the threshold voltage in obtaining piezoelectricity. From selected vibronic band strength ratios, the electric field in the discharge was determined and found to agree with Townsend breakdown.
Cork is a natural cellular and electrically insulating material which may have the capacity to store electric charges on or in its cell walls. Since natural cork has many voids, it is difficult to obtain uniform samples with the required dimensions. Therefore, a more uniform material, namely commercial cork agglomerate, usually used for floor and wall coverings, is employed in the present study. Since we know from our previous work that the electrical properties of cork are drastically affected by absorbed and adsorbed water, samples were protected by means of different polymer coatings (applied by spin-coating or soaking). Corona charging and isothermal charging and discharging currents were used to study the electrical trapping and detrapping capabilities of the samples. A comparison of the results leads to the conclusion that the most promising method for storing electric charges in this cellular material consists of drying and coating or soaking with a hydrophobic, electrically insulating polymer such as polytetraflouroethylene (Teflon (R)). (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Polymer foams with electrically charged cellular voids, the so-called ferroelectrets, are soft piezoelectric transducer materials. Several polymers such as polyethylene terephthalate or cyclo-olefin copolymers are under investigation with respect to their suitability as ferroelectrets. Here, the authors report an additional ferroelectret polymer, cellular polyethylene-naphthalate (PEN), which was prepared from commercial uniform polymer films by means of foaming in supercritical carbon dioxide, inflation, biaxial stretching, electrical charging, and metallization. Piezoelectric d(33) coefficients of up to 140 pC/N demonstrate the suitability of such cellular PEN films for transducer applications. Their piezoelectricity is partially stable at elevated temperatures as high as 100 degrees C.
Electrically charged cellular polymer films can exhibit very high piezoelectric activity and are therefore more and more often employed in advanced electromechanical and electro-acoustical transducers. In this paper, we report an optimized sequence of steps for preparing such ferroelectrets from commercial nonvoided ploy(ethylene terephthalate) (PETP) films by means of foaming with CO2 biaxial mechanical stretching, controlled void inflation, and bipolar electric charging. The nonvoid PETP films foamed with supercritical CO2 at a suitably high pressure and subsequently annealed for stabilization. The cellular foam structure was further optimized by means of well controlled biaxial stretching in a commercial stretcher and sometimes subsequent inflamation in a pressure chamber. Bipolar electric charging of the internal voids was achieved through the application of high electric fields in an SF0 atmosphere. The new optimized PETP ferroelectric exhibit quite large piezoelectric coefficients up to almost 500 pCN(-1), for which unusually low elastic stiffness of only around 0.3 MPa are essential. The PETP foam ferroelectrics posses unclamped thickenss-extension resonance frequences between approximately 120 and 250 kHz, and are thus highly suitable for several established as well as novel ultrasonic-transductant applications.