A small scale viscometer based on IPMCs

AbstractThe vibrational characteristics of a cantilever beam are well known to depend strongly on the fluid in which the beam is immersed. In this paper, we exploit this property to obtain a small scale viscometer, by using an IPMC (Ionic Polymer Metal Composites) based beam. IPMCs are polymeric composites with a lot of interesting properties: they are light, flexible, low cost and biocompatible and present an interesting electro-mechanical coupling capability, moreover by using IPMC it would be possible to obtain integrated devices, being the conditioning circuitry very simple. In this paper a model of the device is presented along with its experimental validation.