Influence of electrode design on actuation characteristics of cooperative DEAP actuators

Inhalt:
We propose DEAP actuators with segmented electrodes as a new actuation approach e.g. for tactile displays. They provide patterns with adjustable bump size (e.g., bump height, bump area and distance between adjacent bumps) and position by powering the segmented electrodes in a cooperative manner. Additionally, moving patterns can be generated with this dynamic concept. Taking a generic electrode design, we study the dependence of the bump height and length on the applied voltage and number of sequential elements using FEM simulations and experiments. Both show qualitatively a similar behavior. For small numbers of powered electrodes, the deflection of DEAP increases linearly with the length of the powered electrode region, however, the deflection height reaches a saturation value when the length of the powered electrode region is about the membrane width for the actuators. At this point, the length of the bump starts to grow according to the length of the actuated electrodes.