Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 6.7
Displacement versus voltage for chitosan/IBMCs (size 3 mm
×
40 mm
×
0.24 mm).
IPMC Composite sensor
Electrodes
Flip
FIGURE 6.8
Sensing and energy-harvesting configuration for IBMCs.
For sensing purposes, the IBMC muscle strips
were mechanically bent, either statically or
dynamically, to record the voltage-generated
output on an oscilloscope, to be observed and
recorded.
Once an electric field is imposed on an IBMC
strip in a cantilever configuration, the hydrated
cations migrate to accommodate the local elec-
tric field. This creates a pressure gradient across
the thickness of the beam, and thus the beam
undergoes bending deformation (
Figure 6.6
)
under small electric fields such as tens of volts
per millimeter.
Figure 6.7
depicts typical deflec-
tion characteristics of cantilever samples of
IBMC artificial muscles. The resulting chitosan/
IBMC displayed good actuation and sensing
properties, as shown in
Figures 6.7-6.9
.
The samples were then placed between two
electrodes and the lead wires attached to an
oscilloscope to observe the sensing and energy-
harvesting capabilities of IBMCs, as shown in
Figures 6.8 and 6.9
. The samples generally
showed very robust and fairly large output
signals in the few millivolt range, which is
