An Electromechanical Model of a Dielectric ElectroActive Polymer Generator

Smart electroactive materials have attracted much of the scientific interest over the past few years, as they reflect a quite promising alternative to conservative approaches used nowadays in various transducer applications. Especially Dielectric ElectroActive Polymers (DEAPs), which are constantly gaining momentum due to their superior low-speed performance, light-weighted nature and higher energy density when compared with competing technologies. In this paper an electromechanical model for a DEAP generator is presented, accounting for both the visco-hyperelastic characteristics of the polymer material, as well as the later one’s experimentally determined stretch-capacitance dependence. Apart from the visco-hyperelastic model validation via purely mechanical experiments, the model’s electromechanical coupling is verified as well, via experiments conducted under all three distinct energy harvesting cycles; namely the Constant Charge (CC), Constant Voltage (CV) and Constant E-field (CE) cycles.