Beyond the Parallel Plate Compliant Capacitor Type of Actuator
Event details
| Date | 03.07.2019 |
| Hour | 11:00 › 12:00 |
| Speaker | Professor David R. Clarke is the inaugural holder of the Extended Tarr Family Professor of Materials in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge, a B.Sc. in Applied Sciences from Sussex University and was awarded a ScD from the University of Cambridge. A member of the National Academy of Engineering since 1999, he is also a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Ceramic Society, and received an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Senior Scientist Award in 1993. He shared the 2008 Japanese NIMS Award for Recent Breakthroughs in Materials Science for Energy and Environment, is a Distinguished Life Member of the American Ceramic Society and was recently listed as author of one of the 11 best papers in the 110 years of publications on ceramics and glasses. His long-term interests in materials range from the fundamentals to the applied, from ceramics to metals to semiconductors and polymers. He has published over 450 papers in areas of materials ranging from thermal barrier coatings, to dielectric elastomers to fundamentals of oxidation to microelectronics reliability and the electrical and optical properties of ZnO and GaN. |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
All dielectric actuators and sensors are essentially compliant capacitors; an applied voltage is converted into a mechanical strain (or, inversely a strain is converted into a voltage). To date, the majority of applications have utilized the analogy of the parallel plate capacitor configuration in which the dielectric is subjected to a spatially uniform electric field through its thickness. Consequently, the strains produced by an applied voltage are uniformly biaxial and perpendicular to the applied field. Furthermore, no shape changes are possible. Despite this restriction, a wide variety of actuator and sensing devices have nevertheless been devised in the last decade as has been demonstrated at the leading centers of dielectric elastomer actuator research, such as at EPFL.
More complex compliant capacitor geometries than the parallel plate capacitor are possible and these lead to a richer variety of possible actuation motions, including reversible and reconfigurable shape changes. In turn, new applications of dielectric elastomer actuators can be devised. In this seminar, I will describe some of the research activities underway in our group as well as our approaches to exploring the opportunities for actuator designs exploiting spatial variations in electric field.
Practical information
- Informed public
- Free
Organizer
- Herbert Shea