Investigation of spray-coated silver-microparticle electrodes for ionic electroactive polymer actuators

We have employed the easy-to-scale-up method of spray-coating in combination with layer-by-layer self-assembly technique to fabricate ionic electroactive polymer actuators (IEAPAs). IEAPAs with spray-coated silver microparticle electrodes demonstrate enhanced strain and response time when compared to nearly identical, optimized conventional IEAPA with gold leaf electrodes. The results demonstrate that strain of these IEAPAs increases with the decrease of thickness of the outer silver microparticle electrodes. In addition, the response time of the actuators at frequencies of 1 and 10Hz improves compared to optimized conventionally fabricated IEAPA. It was found that samples consisting of spray-coated silver electrodes can charge up to similar to 3 times faster than conventional actuators at 1Hz frequency. Faster charging/discharging results in higher mobility of ions within the actuator and thus, faster actuation. Given the relatively large thickness of the silver microparticle electrodes (similar to 50x gold leaf), similar strain was observed due to the lower Young's modulus of spray-coated layers compared to that of bulk material. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.