Cellulose polypyrrole-ionic liquid (CPIL) nanocomposite for durable, biomimetic electro-active paper actuator

초록

Cellulose has received much attention as an emerging smart material, named as electro-active paper (EAPap), which can produce a large bending displacement with applied external electrical field. In spite of many advantages over other reported electro active polymers, the material improvement as an actuator is required due to the poor performance under ambient humidity condition. This paper reports the successful development of highly durable EAPap actuator working at an ambient condition with large displacement output. Nanoscaled polypyrrole was introduced into cellulose EAPap by in-situ polymerization technique followed by activation in ionic liquid solution, which results in cellulose-PPy-IL (CPIL) nanocomposite. CPIL based EAPap actuator showed nearly 100% improvement of the actuator performance compared with the pure cellulose based EAPap actuator systems. © 2010 Copyright SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering.