Development and validation of a fatigue testing setup for dielectric elastomer membrane actuators

Dielectric elastomers (DEs) represent a transduction technology with high potential in many application areas, including industry, due to their low weight, flexibility, and low energy consumption. For industrial applications, it is of fundamental importance to quantify the lifetime of DE technology, in terms of both electrical and mechanical fatigue, when operating in realistic environmental conditions. This work contributes toward this direction, by presenting the development of an experimental setup which allows systematic fatigue testing of DE membranes. The setup permits to apply both mechanical and electrical stimuli to several membranes simultaneously, while measuring at the same time their mechanical (force, displacement) and electrical response (capacitance, resistance). The setup allows to test up to 15 DE membranes at the same time. The setup can be placed in a climate chamber, in order to investigate the fatigue mechanisms at different environmental conditions, i.e. in terms of temperature and humidity. After describing the setup, first fatigue results are shown for several DE membranes loaded at different constant voltage values, and mechanically cycled for several hundred thousands of cycles.