Mussel-inspired synthesis of barium titanate@poly(dopamine)@graphene oxide multilayer core-shell hybrids for high-performance dielectric elastomer actuator

Barium titanate@poly(dopamine)@graphene oxide multilayer core-shell hybrids were prepared for improving electromechanical performance of NBR dielectric elastomer actuator. [Display omitted] •A novel multilayer core-shell hybrid was synthesized by mussel-inspired method.•The mechanic, dielectric and electromechanical properties of composite were studied.•The biomimetic method is simple, efficient, nontoxic, and easy to control. Novel barium titanate@poly(dopamine)@graphene oxide (from inner to outer) (denoted as BT@PDA@GO) multilayer core-shell hybrids were synthesized in this study. Then, the BT@PDA@GO multilayer core-shell hybrids were incorporated into NBR matrix to prepared dielectric elastomer composite. The results showed that the dielectric constant of NBR composite filled with BT@PDA@GO hybrids reached to 15 at 1 kHz, which was about 170% times larger than that of pure NBR, whereas the dielectric loss was just about 0.02 at 1 kHz. In addition, the BT@PDA@GO/NBR composite exhibited a large actuated strain of 8.6% at electric field of 35 kV/mm, about 200% times of pure NBR (4.2%) at the same electric field. This research might help to establish a new strategy to obtain a high performance dielectric elastomer actuator.