Impact of the nature of the compliant electrodes on the dielectric constant of acrylic and silicone electroactive polymers

Dielectric elastomers are emerging electroactive materials used in high performance applications such as robots, artificial muscles and energy harvesting. The development of such applications requires the use of accurate, predictive, reliable models which take into account the dielectric constant (permittivity) of these materials. This dielectric constant is not clearly defined for such applications and depends on many parameters. This leads to values dispersed in the literature for the same electroactive polymer. This paper shows that the nature of the compliant electrodes can influence this dielectric constant significantly. However, the reduction generally observed in this permittivity according to the stretching of elastomer cannot be imputed to the nature of these electrodes, and rather confirms an effect of the volume of the elastomer. This tends to prove that the influence of the compliant electrode is located at the electrode–elastomer interfaces. In addition, the nature of the metallic particles embedded in the electrode grease seems not to influence the value of the dielectric constant. Lastly, we propose analytic laws to describe changes of the dielectric constant as a function of the temperature and the deformation of the material. This makes it possible to define new limits of operation for these polymers for actuators and energy harvesting applications.