BIO

My name is Anghea "Angie" Dolisca and am a second-year in a biomedical engineering major. My hometown is West Palm Beach and I apply on going to graduate school. I have done research on prostate cancer, nephrotoxicity, and I currently research polymer-based artificial muscles. I do research on anything that am interested in learning more about.

Characterizing the Dynamic Swelling of Polymer-Based Artificial Muscles

Abstract

Polymers are substances that have numerous structural units that are linked together using the same type of linkage. Polymer artificial muscle technologies are being developed that produce similar strains to natural muscle and higher stresses using electrostatic forces, electrostriction, ion insertion, and molecular conformational changes.[1] Artificial muscle is a generic term used for a class of bio-inspired materials that can reversibly expand, contract, or rotate due to an external stimulus (such as voltage, current, temperature, or light). [2] Although artificial muscles can mimic specific temporal, spatial, or force regimes seen in biological nature, a single solution that reproduces all these capabilities has yet to be found. This research will aid efforts to identify the best material candidates for practical use as artificial muscle fibers. The purpose of this research is to characterize the dynamic swelling of polymer-based artificial muscles. We hypothesize that conducting polymers will be the best material candidate to use for artificial muscle. Therefore, water sorption and swelling experiments on two types of sulfonated polymer samples were conducted to evaluate their potential to be used as artificial.

Keywords: SPVA, polymer-based artificial muscles, and dynamic swelling