Exploiting Stretchable Metallic Springs as Compliant Electrodes for Cylindrical Dielectric Elastomer Actuators (DEAs).

In recent years, dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) have been widely used in soft robots and artificial bio-medical applications. Most DEAs are composed of a thin dielectric elastomer layer sandwiched between two compliant electrodes. DEAs vary in their design to provide bending, torsional, and stretch/contraction motions under the application of high external voltages.

Organic dyes with remarkably high absorptivity; all solid-state dye sensitized solar cell and role of fluorine substitution.

A series of new organic D-pi-A dyes, A1, A2-H and A2-F, possessing a remarkably high absorption extinction coefficient of epsilon > 5.0 x 10(4) M(-1) cm(-1) at peak wavelength were synthesized, among which, A2-F having a key fluorine substitution attains excellent all solid-state DSSC performance, with optimized parameters of eta = 4.86%, J(SC) = 7.