Electroactive polymers as smart materials with intrinsic actuation properties: new functionalities for biomaterials

Electroactive polymers consist of synthetic polymers capable of changing dimensions and/or shape in response to an electrical input. Materials belonging to this family show useful intrinsic actuation properties, such as sizable active strains and/or stresses, large compliance, low density, low power consumption, ease of processing and low costs. Although many of them have been known since many decades, so far they have found a limited number of uses, despite their potentialities, mainly because of their scarce development towards mature technological levels. On the contrary, promising recent results for such polymers in basic materials science, materials processing and configuration design are encouraging today the concentration of efforts for a concrete exploitation of their performance. This chapter presents a brief survey of the related state of the art, emphasizing both the expected benefits and the challenging issues for their potential use as biomaterials in different types of applications.