Experimental Studies about the Carbon Nanotube Actuation Mechanism

Abstract

Excellent properties make researchers focusing on carbon nanotubes (CNTs) since years. Beside that it is found that structures made of CNTs can be actuated when they are set up like a capacitor. This paper focuses on investigations of the actuation mechanism of dif-ferent types of carbon nanotube (CNT) based actuators. At first the active characteristics of two dimensionally compressed papers with randomly oriented CNTs (2D compressed CNT-papers, so called Bucky papers) are investigated. Comprehensive experiments show that 2D-papers can represent only partially the active behaviour of single CNTs. In a second step a process to manufacture aligned CNT-based structures is presented. These aligned CNT based papers can be used for a more efficient transfer of the CNT-elongation to an electro-mechanical application. At the end an ex-perimental outlook is given using untreated CNT-arrays. In combination with a new ex-perimental set-up an even more precise analysis of the CNT-actuation is possible.