Research on automatic spraying of single-walled carbon nanotubes and detection of spraying effects

Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) have been introduced as compliant electrodes for dielectric elastomers (DEs) due to fault tolerance. To acquire a better electrostrictive strain and longer lifetime, it is essential to obtain a certain and uniform width of the SWNT electrode. To ensure uniform width manually, a small flux and longer time are necessary. Moreover, it is difficult to control the width of the electrode for the randomness of manual spraying. Therefore, a new type of automatic spraying process is presented in this paper. The width and homogeneity of the electrode can be easily controlled by certain parameters of the process. Two methods for detecting the homogeneity of the electrode are introduced in this paper: Measurement of surface resistance and luminosity. The coefficient of variation (CV) values detected by the two methods are virtually equal and less than 8%, which shows the feasibility of the detection method and homogeneity of automatic spraying. The speed of automatic spraying is 102 mm²/s, which is higher than that of manual spraying. The spraying process and the method used to detect homogeneity in this paper provide a reference for the relevant processes.