Polyvinyl Chloride Gel Incorporated by ZnO Core‐Shell Nanoparticles for Dielectric Elastomer Actuator With Enhanced Electromechanical Response

Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) are widely used in soft robotics, medical devices, wearable electronics, and other fields. Plasticized polyvinyl chloride (PVC gel) is a good candidate to fabricate DEAs. However, current PVC gel suffers from low dielectric constant, low breakdown strength, and high viscoelastic effect, hampering its DEA applications. This paper employed polydopamine coated ZnO (PDA@ZnO) nanoparticles with core–shell structures as fillers to modify the PVC gel, the resultant PDA@ZnO/PVC composite exhibited multiple outstanding benefits such as a high dielectric constant of 9.02 @ 1 kHz and a strong breakdown strength of 78.52 V/μm. Especially, assisted by the synergistic effect between the plasticizer of dibutyl adipate and the fillers of PDA@ZnO, the hybrid composite presented a dramatically reduced elastic modulus of 0.18 MPa, while still holding a high elongation at break of >370%. The resultant DEA therefore exhibited superior electromechanical properties: under a low electric field of ≈10 V/μm, the hybrid DEA not only produced a large area strain of 15.28%, increasing by 4.94‐folds compared to the pure PVC DEA, but also maintained a severely low relative displacement shift of 5.34% over 3600 s actuation, much lower than the reported values of the current PVC actuators.