User:Jing Xu (UU)/sandbox

Electrostatic generators
Electrostatics is a normal phenomenon in our daily life, but what is the working principle of electrostatics? Usually, electrostatics happens at the time of imbalanced charge in the presence of object surfaces. For instance, rubbing a nonconductive object generates a amount of static electricity which could easily attract an empty aluminium can. This is not just the result of friction, but also the distribution of charge on the surface is changed. For more examples, please see Static Electricity Demonstrations Part one Induction. Conductive objects barely generate charge imbalance, unless they are impacted by solid or liquid nonconductors.

The electrostatic force can not only exhibit attractive but also repulsive forces.

Electrostatic actuators
Electrostatic actuators are mainly inclusive of two conducting electrodes, an applied voltage, and different structures of electrodes. Electrostatic actuators can be categorized into different types by various structures or arrangements of the electrodes. Despite various arrangements, the force between the two conducting electrodes will nearly always be attractive when a voltage is applied, if there exists mutual capacitance. There are roughly two categorized electrostatic actuators, linear and rotary. The main classes of rotary electrostatic actuators are : (1) top-drive, (2) side-drive, and (3) wobble harmonic. These devices are often called micromotors.

Applications

 * Soft robotics

There are several applications in soft robotics. It can be employed as clutches with lower energy (usually high voltage low current)  and mechanical impedance. For instance, the clutch (15 g) consumed only 3.2 mW of power when holding 190 N. Other applications include but are not limited to multimode hydraulically amplified electrostatic actuators for wearable haptics, robots driven by electrostatic actuators.