Jimmy Tingrui Pan Prof. Babak Ziaie University of Minnesota NSF-REU Summer 2003

Brief Overview What the hell are Conductive Polymer Microactuators? Motivation / unreachable goal Experimentation and fabrication Future Work

What is this stuff? Conducting Polymer : Certain kind of polymer which undergoes a volume change in an ionic solution under an applied voltage, such as polypyrrole (PPy) Microactuator : Something really tiny that moves.

How it works I stole this picture fair and square

What we want Ahmed Glaucoma Valve, implantable (only one color available)

How to get there Grow PPy Pattern PPy Fabricate an actuator Actuate an actuator Create valve

Growing PPy Another stolen picture, depicting electropolymerization Electrolyte : 0.1 M pyrrole in aqeous 0.1 M Sodium Dodecylbenzenesulfonate (NaDBS) Applied voltages range from 0.5v – 0.8v

Smoothness Higher voltage resulted in much faster yet rougher deposition 0.5v0.6v0.7v0.8v

Actuator Test Patterns

Fabrication! Silicon Silicon Oxide (SiO 2 ) Titanium Gold PPy Actuation! Immersed in 0.1 M aqueous NaDBS, -1v applied

Oh crap. Problem : Actuator ‘fingers’ like to tear off Possible solution : make them thicker, handle them more gently

What’s Next? Actuate the damn thing Fabricate valves Design drainage device (No, this won’t happen in the next week)

What Else? Artificial cilia, anyone? This is a caption

Lookit all the little holes! If you can read this, you don’t need eyeglasses

Maybe it’s grass? Silicon Gold PPy ????? Silicon

Gee, that was fun Researched and grew PPy films Designed actuators Hope to someday make something cool

Any questions? This is an outright copyright violation, and I will burn in hell.