A Novel Determination Method of IPMC Young’s Modulus Based on Cantilever Resonance Theory

Abstract

The research is aimed at presenting a novel determination method of IPMC (Ionic Polymer Metal Composites) Young’s Modulus. This method would fill up some deficiencies, such as damaging the tested IPMC strip, having low precision and so on, in the traditional method like tensile test and bending test. The paper presents a novel determination method based on cantilever resonance theory. Cantilever resonance theory is one of the methods to determinate the Young’s modulus of metal wire and metal strip. This method adopts Euler-Bernoulli beam to build a vibration differential equation of the beam. Then, by using the separate variable method, the general solution of the equation would be obtained. Considering the boundary conditions, a formula about the relation of the Young’s modulus and the first natural frequency is obtained. Limited by the experimental equipment and test method, this method has not been applied in the composite material. This paper attempts to apply this method in the IPMC material. The laser probing DISP (displacement) technique is applied in the test experiment. The laser displacement transducer is a kind of accurate un-contact laser displacement measurement set. The distance measured, which could be used to measure the change in position of the tested object, is based on the triangle principle.