Journal
MACROMOLECULAR MATERIALS AND ENGINEERING
Volume 305, Issue 11, Pages -Publisher
WILEY-V C H VERLAG GMBH
DOI: 10.1002/mame.202000421
Keywords
artificial muscles; carbon nanotubes; conductive polymers; polymeric actuators; smart textiles
Funding
- Promobilia Foundation [F17603]
- Swedish Government Strategic Research Area in Materials Science on Functional Materials at Linkoping University (faculty grant SFO Mat LiU) [2009-00971]
- Swedish Research Council [2014-3079]
- Carl Trygger Foundation [CTS:17-215]
- European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program [825232]
- University of Wollongong's Visiting International Scholar Award
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Electrochemically or electrothermally driven twisted/coiled carbon nanotube (CNT) yarn actuators are interesting artificial muscles for wearables as they can sustain high stress. However, due to high fabrication costs, these yarns have limited their application in smart textiles. An alternative approach is to use off-the-shelf yarns and coat them with conductive polymers that deliver high actuation properties. Here, novel hybrid textile yarns are demonstrated that combine CNT and an electroactive polypyrrole coating to provide both high strength and good actuation properties. CNT-coated polyester yarns are twisted and coiled and subjected to electrochemical coating of polypyrrole to obtain the hierarchical soft actuators. When twisted without coiling, the polypyrrole-coated yarns produce fully reversible 25 degrees mm(-1)rotation, 8.3x higher than the non-reversible rotation from twisted CNT-coated yarns in a three-electrode electrochemical system operated between +0.4 and -1.0 V (vs Ag/AgCl). The coiled yarns generate fully reversible 10 degrees mm(-1)rotation and 0.22% contraction strain, 2.75x higher than coiled CNT-coated yarns, when operated within the same potential window. The twisted and coiled yarns exhibit high tensile strength with excellent abrasion resistance in wet and dry shearing conditions that can match the requirements for using them as soft actuators in wearables and textile exoskeletons.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available