Displacement magnification of gel actuator using pNIPAAm-SU8 hybrid structure

In this paper, a fabrication method for a hybrid structure of the poly-N-Isopropylacrylamide (pNIPAAm) gel as a soft material and the SU-8 as a solid material is proposed. This pNIPAAm-SU8 hybrid structure can be applied to various applications such as gel actuators. These hybrid structures have a serious problem that it is easily broken by the difference of swelling rate. Our proposed hybrid structure was not broken though repeating swelling-shrinking states for 10 or more times. A small displacement of the gel is occurred by the phase transition, then it is magnified by combining with the SU-8 solid structure. We demonstrated that the expanded tip displacement of the SU-8 solid structure reached 145μm.