ABSTRACT
Reversible colour creation is becoming increasingly attractive in many research fields and applications such as communication, display devices and structural design. Dielectric Elastomer Actuators (DEAs) are of great interest since their invention by researchers from Stanford Research Institute (SRI) (Pelrine et al. 2000). They are a highly promising new technology for optical applications such as tuneable transmission gratings and variable diffraction gratings (Aschwanden et al. 2008; Fang et al. 2010), tuneable focus optical lenses (Carpi et al. 2011; Son et al. 2012) and active camouflage (Rossiter et al. 2012). Use of DEAs to create colour change can be very beneficial due to their stretchability, low weight, high efficiency, low cost and possibility for miniaturisation. In this paper we present ongoing research at Queen Mary University of London on a novel approach to use DEAs to create colour changes.
