Highly sustainable electroactive artificial muscle with graphene

Electroactive artificial muscles driven by electrical stimuli have been widely developed for practical applications including bio-mimetic robots and active biomedical devices. However, conventional ionic type artificial muscles have a critical drawback of poor sustainability under long-time excitations, mainly because the inner electrolyte and hydrated cations can leak out through cracks in the metallic electrodes. Here, we developed a highly sustainable electro-active artificial muscle by using hydrophobic reduced graphene oxide papers. The highly conductive, flexible and cost-effective carbon electrodes have smooth outer surface and rough inner surface, for mechanical adhesion between electrodes and an ionic membrane and water floating functions. More importantly, the carbon electrode has a unique functionality of the vaporized or liquid electrolyte impermeability, greatly benefits for a highly sustainable electro-active artificial muscle.