Electroactive polymers (EAPs) are smart materials that have electromechanical and mechanoelectrical transduction properties. They are flexible, lightweight, easy to shape and cheap to produce. These properties allow EAPs to be used as actuators or sensors in applications such as soft robotics, metamaterial structures, or other future technologies where the use of traditional transducers might not be feasible. Past research has mainly focused on the actuation property of EAP materials, while their sensing property has received less attention. For the implementation of EAPs as sensors in future technologies, detailed characterisation of their sensing performance is essential. The sensing characterisation in current literature was found to be of poor quality. Most of the studies that investigated the sensing performance of EAP materials did not accurately describe the deformation imposed on their samples and focused mainly on a narrow window of frequencies for dynamic characterisation. The aim of this thesis is to address this gap in the literature and develop a method to obtain detailed sensing characteristics of EAP cantilever samples during bending. This is done by designing a bending characterisation setup that can bend EAP cantilever samples in their first bending mode for a range of different frequencies.
This setup is then used to characterise the sensing performance of an IPMC sample by obtaining the sensitivity, phase delay, coherence, signal-to-noise ratio, repeatability and stability, for a frequency range of 0.1 to 20 Hz. These characteristics were determined for both active and passive sensing methods under identical conditions, which allowed these methods to be directly compared. It was concluded that the quality of the measurements was good as the coherence and SNR values were higher than those of previous studies. The successful characterisation of the IPMC sample demonstrated that the bending setup can be effectively used to compare the performance of new samples in the future.