CARBON NANOTUBE-BASED ACTUATORS

Abstract

This paper focuses on the investigation of the actuation mechanism of different materials based on Carbon nanotubes (CNTs). On the one hand the active characteristics of two dimensional compressed papers with randomly oriented CNTs (2d compressed CNT-papers so called Bucky-Paper) are investigated. The pre-sented research shows experimentally extracted considerations that the mentioned 2d papers represent the real active behavior of single CNTs just partially. On the other hand a manufactur-ing process of CNT-based aligned structures is shown. These aligned CNT based papers can be used for a more efficient transfer of the CNT-elongation into an electro-mechanical application. Parallel a new experimental set-up using untreated CNT-arrays are presented which allows an even more precise analyze of the CNT-displacement. First test results of multi-walled CNTs and planned experiments on isolated single-walled CNTs are shown.