Quartz has a dissipation factor of approximately 10(-4), which is an order of magnitude less than that of the best glasses previously used to fabricate patch pipettes; it's dielectric constant of 3.8 is also lower than that of other glasses. On the basis of these electrical characteristics it is expected that patch pipettes pulled from quartz tubing will produce significantly less noise than pi...

Cylindrical elastomers were prepared through the UV-initiated crosslinking of terminally acrylated, 8,000 Da star-poly(trimethylene carbonate-co-ε-caprolactone) and star-poly(trimethylene carbonate-co-D,L-lactide). These elastomers were implanted intramuscularly into the hind legs of male Wistar rats to determine the influence of the comonomer on the weight loss, tissue response, and change in ...

This chapter reports on advances done in the design of compliant, Dielectric Elastomer based Linear Actuators (DELA). Dielectric Elastomers (DE) are incompressible deformable dielectrics which can experience deviatoric (isochoric) finite deformations in response to applied large electric fields while, at the same time, alter the applied electric fields in response to the deformations undergone ...

The combined effect of filler networking and reduced chain mobility close to the filler interface on the dynamic-mechanical properties of elastomers is analyzed based on investigations of the relaxation dynamics of solution styrene butadiene rubber filled with different loadings of silica. Dynamic-mechanical and dielectric spectra are studied in a wide frequency and temperature range. For the c...

Dielectric elastomers (DEs) that couple deformation and electrostatics have the potential for use in soft sensors actuators with applications ranging from robotic, biomedical, energy, aerospace automotive technologies. However, currently available DEs are limited by weak electromechanical coupling require large electric fields significant actuation. In this work, a statistical mechanics-based m...