An electroactive and soft haptic actuator made of knitted polyvinyl chloride (PVC) gel fabric is proposed herein. This haptic actuator consists of an upper layer, a lower layer, and fabric made by twisting long and slender PVC gel strings. The PVC gel fabric changes its shape according to the input voltage waveform, and exerts an electrostatic force between the upper and lower layers. When the applied voltage is removed, the PVC gel fabric rapidly restores to its initial configuration. Consequently, these effects generate vibrations that are sufficiently strong for human perception. We conducted quantitative experiments to investigate the performance of our soft haptic actuator using an accelerometer and a laser scanning vibrometer. Furthermore, we performed a perceptual evaluation and the results indicate that our proposed actuator can stimulate the human skin with sufficient perceptual strength.

Metallic nanostructures (MNs) and metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) play a pivotal role by articulating their significance in high-performance supercapacitors along with conducting polymers (CPs). The interaction and synergistic pseudocapacitive effect of MNs with CPs have contributed to enhance the specific capacitance and cyclic stability. Among various conjugated heterocyclic CPs, polypyrrole (PPy) (prevalently knows as “synthetic metal”) is exclusively studied because of its excellent physicochemical properties, ease of preparation, flexibility in surface modifications, and unique molecular structure–property relationships. Numerous researchers attempted to improve the low electronic conductivity of MNs and MOFs, by incorporating conducting PPy and/or used decoration strategy. This was succeeded by fine-tuning this objective, which managed to get outstanding supercapacitive performances. This brief technical note epitomizes various PPy-based metallic hybrid materials with different nano-architectures, emphasizing its technical implications in fabricating high-performance electrode material for supercapacitor applications.

This paper proposes a small, transparent, electroactive and highly deformable poly vinyl chloride (PVC) gel-based bending actuator. The effect of the PVC molecular weight and plasticizer content on the performance of the bending actuator is investigated. Three PVCs are prepared with different molecular weights (low molecular weight: PVC_L, 116,000; medium molecular weight: PVC_M, 239,000; and high molecular weight: PVC_H, 282,000) and mixed with plasticizers in various ratios to achieve the best performance of the bending actuator. Experiments are conducted to investigate the bending performance of the actuators based on the prepared PVC gels. Among the prepared actuators, the PVC_H-based bending actuator shows the best performance (maximum bending angle: 180°, elapsed time: 3.15 s).

In this paper, we propose a soft vibrotactile actuator made by mixing silicon dioxide (SiO ₂ ) nanoparticles and plasticized PVC gel. The effect of the silicon dioxide nanoparticles in the plasticized PVC gel for the haptic performance is investigated in terms of electric, dielectric, and mechanical properties. Furthermore, eight soft vibrotactile actuators are prepared as a function of the SiO ₂ content. Experiments are conducted to examine the haptic performance of the prepared eight soft vibrotactile actuators and to find the best weight ratio of the plasticized PVC gel to the SiO ₂ nanoparticles. The experiments should show that the plasticized PVC gel with silicon dioxide nanoparticles improves the haptic performance of the plasticized PVC gel-based vibrotactile actuator, and the proposed vibrotactile actuator can create a variety of haptic sensations in a wide frequency range.

In this work, silver nanoparticle – polyvinylchloride (SNC-PVC) composites were synthesized by loading 2.5% to 10.0% silver ions to PVC using simple solution casting technique. Material properties including dielectric, thermal stability were discussed in some detail. Incorporation of silver nanoparticles (SNPs) in the PVC matrix was confirmed by UV-Visible spectroscopy (UV-Vis), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) and Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FE-SEM). FE-SEM confirms the shape of the SNPs are roughly spherical with average size of the SNPs in the range of 60 - 80 nm. The thermal degradation studies were analysed via sensitive graphical Broido’s method using Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). The resulting SNC-PVC films, especially with 10% silver loading showed improved catalytic performance during the reduction of 4-nitrophenol (4-NP) to 4-aminophenol (4-AP) in the presence of aqueous sodium borohydride with apparent rate constant 1.956 × 10^-3 sec^-1 at ambient temperature.

We fabricated a soft thin-film vibrotactile actuator, which can be easily inserted into wearable devices, based on an electroactive PVC gel. One of the most important factors in fabricating a soft and thin vibrotactile actuator is to create vibrational force strong enough to stimulate human skin in a wide frequency range. To achieve this, we investigate the working principle of the PVC gel and suggest a new structure in which most of electric energy contributes to the deformation of the PVC gel. Due to this structure, the vibrational amplitude of the proposed PVC gel actuator could considerably increase (0.816 g (g = 9.8 m/s²) at resonant frequency). The vibrotactile amplitude is proportional to the amount of input voltage. It increased from 0.05 g up to 0.416 g with increasing applied voltages from 200 V to 1 kV at 1 Hz. The experimental results show that the proposed actuator can create a variety of haptic sensations.