Design, Modeling, and Experimental Validation of a High Voltage Driving Circuit for Dielectric Elastomer Actuators

Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) require high driving voltages (typically in the order of kV) to generate meaningful displacements. As DEA technology becomes more spread, the availability of small, inexpensive, lightweight, and low-power driving electronic circuits is essential. Moreover, to achieve fast and accurate control of the voltage delivered to the DEA, the development of dynamic models capable of accurately describing the response of the driving circuit is of fundamental importance. This work describes a control-oriented model for a novel high-voltage driving circuit for DEAs, consisting of a combination of a charging stage (i.e., a cascade of a resonant converter and a rectifier Greinacher circuit) and a discharging stage. The proposed circuit is small, lightweight, and low cost. It is capable of driving capacitive loads on the order of 600 pF by amplifying a 0-6 V input signal up to 0-3 kV at its output. After presenting the circuit, a lumped-parameter dynamic model is derived to describe the input-output relationship. The prediction performances of the developed model are assessed through extensive experiments.