Multi-physical modeling and fabrication of high-performance IPMC actuators with serrated interface

Ionic Polymer–Metal Composite (IPMC) has been widely recognized as a promising and representative candidate of soft intelligent materials actuated under low voltage. In the last few years, the importance of the electrode/substrate interface has received growing attention for research on both the modeling of ion-based mass transport and practical performance of the manipulation of ionic electro-active actuators. In this paper, based on a macroscopic serrated interface morphology, the influences of the interface were revealed comprehensively by distinguishing the bending direction as well as the variation of interfacial area, excisional volume and moment of inertia. The offsetting interaction from different aspects were analyzed in detail. On this basis, an interesting result showed that, contrary to current understanding, an enlarged interface area did not necessarily lead to better deformation, which was primarily ascribed to the trade-off of influences from the increasing excisional volume and decreasing bending inertia moment. In addition, a corresponding fabrication process was established, which verified experimentally that IPMC with a super simple macroscopic serrated interface can present a high electro-active performance, providing a minimalist design strategy for ionic electroactive polymer structures.