Development of electro-adhesion clutch and its application to force display

Electro-Rheological Gel (ERG) is a functional elastomer which changes the adhesive property according to applied electric field. This unique property of ERG is named as electro-adhesion effect (EA effect). The one-sided pattern electrodes is a very useful idea to free sliding or rotating parts from wiring arrangements and contribute to extend the application field for ER materials. The purpose of this study is to develop the electro-adhesion clutch (EA clutch) applying the ERG with one-sided electrodes as the novel clutch mechanism. In order to exhibit the wide change of the transferred torque in EA clutch, the optimum pattern of one-sided electrode which can obtain the high EA effect is designed and the EA clutch is manufactured with its designed electrodes. From the result of its performance evaluation, it is clear that transferred torque is almost proportional to applied voltage between one-sided electrodes. Moreover, in this study, EA clutch system which controls transferred torque with PID controller is developed and applied to force display device. The result shows that the variable viscous torque can be exhibited to human beings.