INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRECISION ENGINEERING AND MANUFACTURING Vol. 11, No. 6, pp. 987-990 DECEMBER 2010 / 987 DOI: 10.1007/s12541-010-0120-2 1. Introduction In recent years, soft material and manufacturing processes have been developed for biomimetic robot and actuators applications. 1,2 Many soft polymers, so call electro-active polymers have been developed so far including ionic polymer metal composites, conductive polymers, 3,4 dielectric elastomers and piezoelectric polymers. 5,6 Cellulose is one of the most naturally abundant biopolymers. Cellulose has been utilized in many fields due to its biocompatibility and chirality for the immobilization of proteins, antibodies as well as the formation of cellulose composites with synthetic polymers and biopolymers. 7 Recently, cellulose has been discovered as a smart material that can be used as sensor and actuator materials. 8 This smart material is termed as electro-active paper (EAPap). 9 EAPap has many advantages as a smart material in terms of lightweight, dryness, low cost, biodegradability, large deformation, low actuation voltage and low power consumption. 10 EAPap actuator is electrically activated due to a combination of ion migration and piezoelectric effects. Once the piezoelectric effect is maximized in EAPap, then this material can be used for many applications such as sensors, microelectro-mechanical systems, speakers, microphones, transducers, and so on. The improvement of the piezoelectric effect in the EAPap is strongly associated with the alignment of cellulose fibers. According to our previous research, the alignment of cellulose fibers in EAPap has been achieved by a mechanical stretching that improved its piezoelectric property. 11,12 In this paper, EAPap was fabricated by an automated process to realize large-size production and reliable properties of EAPap. The automated process consists of dissolving, centrifuging, casting, curing, stretching and drying steps. So far, a fixture has been used to manually stretch the samples, which holds two ends of the samples and stretch by turning a screw. However, after stretching and drying, the shape of the manually stretched samples was turned out to be convex, which indicated the cellulose fibers were not aligned parallel to the stretching direction. Thus, for continuous and parallel stretching of cellulose fibers, a zone stretching method was innovated. Evaluation of Cellulose Electro-Active Paper Made by Tape Casting and Zone Stretching Methods Sungryul Yun 1 , Jaehwan Kim 1,# and Kang-Su Lee 2 1 Center for EAPap Actuator, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Inha University, 253, Yonghyun-dong, Nam-gu, Incheon, Korea, 402-751 2 Korean Register of Shipping, 386-2, 3 Daedeok TBC, Doryong-dong, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, Korea, 305-340 # Corresponding Author / E-mail: jaehwan@inha.ac.kr, TEL: +82-32-860-7326, FAX: +82-32-832-7325 KEYWORDS: Electro-Active Polymer, Tape Casting, Zone Stretching, Piezoelectricity Cellulose has been discovered as a smart material that can be used as sensor and actuator material. In this paper, cellulose smart material termed as electro-active paper (EAPap) is prepared by an automated process that includes tape casting and zone stretching. To evaluate characteristics of the EAPap, its Young’s modulus and piezoelectric charge constant are measured depending on the orientation angle, in comparison with the manually fabricated EAPap results. The zone stretching method can effectively align the cellulose fibers in the EAPap so as to improve its Young’s modulus as well as piezoelectric charge constant. The 0 degree oriented sample shows its maximum Young’s modulus and the 45 degree oriented sample exhibits the maximum piezoelectric charge constant. This 45 degree is associated with its shear piezoelectricity. The actuator performance of EAPap is evaluated by measuring its bending displacement depending on the orientation angle and the excitation voltage. The 45 degree oriented sample exhibits the maximum bending displacement. Details of the material preparation, the automation process, characterization and the actuator performance are addressed. This automated process that includes tape casting and zone stretching is suitable for mass production of the EAPap. Manuscript received: July 19, 2010 / Accepted: August 9, 2010 © KSPE and Springer 2010