Development of Electrostatic Motor as Biomimicking Skeletal Muscle.

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Recently Yano proposed a new theory of muscle contraction, termed Electrostatic linear motor model. His theory has not yet been authorized. The principle of this model, however, is very attractive for realizing an artificial muscle. Because it can explain almost all phenomena of muscle contraction consistently. We, therefore, started developing an electrostatic linear motor as a biomimicking skeletal muscle.The fundamental motor unit consists of a parallel plate capacitor and a slider made of dielectric material. Based on this model, we derived the theoretical formulae for the various characteristics of the motor.Following facts were revealed through the experiments using the fundamental model of the motor.1)The theoretical formulae agree well with the experimental results.2)The thrust can be increased by decreasing the thickness of the motor.3)Integration of the micrometer sized motor units is very effective to increase the thrust.4)The coefficient of kinetic friction between the stator and the slider should be less than one.Base on these results, we designed the simple model to know the feasibility of this motor. This linear motor is expected to be able to use in practice.