文摘
A closed-loop hydrogel-based thermal actuator is designed, simulated and tested for improving the transient response. A system model of such a closed-loop actuator is implemented in Matlab/Simulink, where the Voigt-Kelvin model is utilized to describe the viscoelastic behavior of polymeric hydrogels. The numerical simulation is used to investigate the influence of the parameters of the Proportional-Integral (PI) controller on the transient response (such as overshoot, rise time and settling time, etc). Through the tests, this closed-loop actuator shows an at least 50% reduction in settling time compared to actuators in conventional open-loop configuration.