Integrated Textile-Biased Dielectric Elastomer Feedback Actuator

Due to their properties, dielectric elastomer actuators (DEA) are suitable for wearable and textile-integrated applications. This paper presents DEA based flexible components, in which the textile itself is used as biasing mechanism for the active dielectric membrane. With this structure, a highly integrated tactile feedback element for user interaction is developed, with no need of additional biasing elements or structures. Different geometries of the pre-load element and different textile pre-stretches are considered for the system design. Experimental characterization under different loading and constraints is performed to measure the system performance. The prototypes output force and output movement are measured with different applied voltage stimuli. The voltage and frequency dependent performance of the system is evaluated. The measured performance of the system is compared with human feeling thresholds known from the literature, to validate the functionality of the prototype in wearable applications.