Characteristics and elastic modulus evaluation of Pd-Nafion ionic polymer-metal composites

Ionic polymer-metal composites (IPMCs) show great potential in a large variety of engineering fields as actuator materials. They mainly consist of electrodes and ionic polymer as the substrate material. Many metal materials can be used as the electrode material of IPMCs. In this paper palladium was adopted to get a compromise between the cost and the stability, and Pd-Nafion IPMC was fabricated by chemical plating as test sample. Preliminary experiments were accomplished with satisfactory result using a suit of self-made measurement setup. The results showed that palladium was a good electrode material. Although some previous work has investigated on the elastic modulus of IPMCs by tensile test, a simple method based on the cantilever beam theory to estimate the modulus is still proposed here, which does not need a tensile testing machine. By the method we got that the elastic modulus of the sample is 362.35MPa.