The Polymer Society of Korea

Abstract

In this study, a sandwich structure with the re-entrant core was applied to the bending actuator to increase the recovery force. The programming process of the sandwich type SMPC actuator was progressed in the two steps: compression followed by bending at the temperature above glass transition temperature (T_g). Adding the compression step enables the high global elastic deformation with small local strain. In addition, re-entrant core helped the compression without failure so that the optimum shape of the re-entrant core was selected through the simulation and the experiment. Finally, the recovery force was measured to evaluate the performance of the sandwich type SMPC actuator.