Comparison of Super Coiled Polymer actuator made using a twisting machine and the one made by conventional procedure

Abstract

Nylon fiber actuators, that can be manufactured by twisting nylon fibers and annealing them, has been researched. Meanwhile, since the manufacturing process is manual, the performance of the actuator varies. To reduce the variation in the performance of the actuators, we have developed a twisting machine that simplifies the manufacturing process of the actuators. The twisting machine has three motors, and by controlling these motors, nylon fibers are twisted while being kept constant tension, and wound on a bobbin. In this paper, we report that a large actuator can be manufactured with the twisting machine. In addition, we investigated how much the difference in displacement or force occurs during driving between a part of the manufactured large actuator and an actuator manufactured by the existing established method. From the results of these experiment, it was suggested that fabrication with the twisting machine could improve the positioning accuracy of the actuator.