Electrostrictive PVDF-TrFE Thin Film Actuators for the Control of Adaptive Thin Shell Reflectors

Abstract

This paper presents the technology to control the shape of thin polymer doubly curved shell structures with a unimorph layer of strain actuators to achieve high quality, light-weight, foldable space reflectors. The selected active material is PVDF-TrFE deposited by spin coating; it is electrostrictive, isotropic and enjoys an excellent piezoelectric coefficient d 31 ≃ 15 pC/N when properly annealed, but has a nonlinear, quadratic behavior. The strain actuation is controlled by an array of segmented electrodes. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the material properties achieved in the manufacturing process. A simple, unidirectional model of electrostrictive material is considered and the material constants (electrostrictive constant Q 33 , piezoelectric constant d 31 , spontaneous polarization P s and poling strain S P ) are estimated from various static and dynamic experiments. The final part of the paper illustrates the control authority on a small demonstrator with seven independent electrodes and compares the experimental results with numerical finite element simulations.