Force, Stress, Strain Actuators for the promotion of: Artificial Muscles and Tendons

INTRODUCTION

• From its commercial beginnings in the late 1930s up to recent years, the fundamental marketing strategy of the plastics industry has been to develop and refine polymeric materials that could replace "traditional" materials - metals, wood, rubber, glass, paper, et al. - in existing, high-volume and/or high-value applications (Ashley 2003).
• Whereas there are also advanced composites with high-modulus fibers available to compete against the great strength of steel, the one characteristic of steel and other metals that has consistently eluded polymer scientists is electrical conductivity, until recently.A measure of conductivity was achieved, but there were generally compromises in terms of processability or performance or total part economics.
• Thus, the search for "inherently conductive" polymers commenced in earnest in corporate, academic and government-supported research laboratories around the world - in the U.S., Europe and Japan, in particular. And in the 1950s and 1960s, as the implications of the microelectronics revolution became apparent to all, the search for such materials accelerated further, taking on the trappings of the search for the Holy Grail.
• In the mid-1970s, quite by accident, the first polymer capable of conducting electricity - polyacetylene - was discovered at the University of Pennsylvania. The announcement of this discovery quickly reverberated around the polymer science community, and the intensity of the search for others magnified dramatically. By 1984-1985 the number of patents issued in the field of electrically conductive polymers had shot up, and by 1987 the first application - a polymer electrode in a miniature ("button") battery - was registered.
• In the early years and decades of the 21st century, the processes and the products in a host of vital industries:- aircraft/aerospace - automobiles - biotechnology - chemical processing - electrical/electronic equipment - military hardware will be completely transformed by the integration of these conductive polymers into an ever-widening menu of materials.
• U.S. and global manufacturers and their material/part suppliers have always faced a choice between the known and the unknown in materials decision-making. The companies that are willing to plumb the unknown and learn to enhance their total processing/performance spectrum will enter the next century as vital competitors in the evolving global marketplace for products and services. Those that don't will soon face technological obsolescence and disappear. This certainly applies all along the product/service supply chain in the industries cited above and others as well.
• The companies that succeed in developing and marketing electrically conductive polymers and other novel molecular transformations will be those driven by "patient money." These are hardly materials that offer quick rewards "going right down to the bottom line." Rather, this is a field where careful, time-consuming and very often cooperative research will eventually be rewarded with applications beyond any contemporary crystal ball-gazing. And in our research we have identified many companies - in North America, Europe and Asia - determined to participate in those applications in the future with materials currently dubbed "exotic."

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Physics 103 Fall 2003 Dr. David Newman

last updated on 24-Nov-2003