A design of self-sustained gel actuator

Abstract

Many types of stimuli-sensitive gels have been studied and applied to soft actuators with the progress of the functional materials. Especially, electro-active polymer gels seem to be promising. In all cases, however, the mechanical motion is powered by electric stimuli. Herein we show the self-susteined gel actuator driven by chemical energy. The polymer gels can undergo periodic expansion and contraction without external stimuli. The volume oscillation is induced by the oscillatory Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction, producing displacement up to 10 to 100 μm. Here it is shown that the applying load to the polymer gels substantially improves the actuation performance. The actuated displacement up to 1.15mm were demonstrated. This novel active gels reported in this paper is excellent tools for the successful design and use of the electric-free actuators.