Evaluation of dielectric gel coating for encapsulation of ionic polymer–metal composite (IPMC) actuators

Ionic polymer–metal composites (IPMCs) need ionic hydration to operate. Being water the most used solvent, it happens that during the IPMC air operational life it will eventually dry. With the objective of producing an air-operable IPMC actuator, a new encapsulation process using a dielectric gel is proposed in this paper. We describe the encapsulation procedure and a set of experiments that were performed to verify the evolution of electrical and mechanical IPMC characteristics after 1 day, 1 week, and after 20 days of encapsulation. The results show that the encapsulated IPMC remained hydrated and its performance maintained, indicating the potentiality of the dielectric gel as an IPMC encapsulant material.