Contractile folded dielectric elastomer actuators

New lightweight, compliant, reliable and cheap contractile linear actuators are demanded today for many fields of application, such as robotics, automation and biomedical disciplines. Within the family of electroactive polymers, dielectric elastomers are rapidly emerging as high-performance transduction materials, resulting particularly attractive in order to accomplish different kinds of tasks. The design of efficient device architectures, capable of taking the most from the material properties with practical solutions, is not trivial. In particular, the state of the art of contractile dielectric elastomer actuators offers device configurations resulting not always of easy fabrication. To overcome this drawback, a new actuating configuration, referred to as 'folded dielectric elastomer actuator', has been recently described. This paper presents prototype samples of this new type of actuator, along with different examples of applications currently being developed.