Hydrolyzed Polyacrylamide (PAAM) hydrogels are electroactive, biocompatible and non-biodegradable materials. Their main attractive characteristic is their operative similarity with biological muscles and particularly their life-like movement. They suit better the artificial muscle fabrication despite their response time which stays low compared to natural human muscle due to their bulky structure and due to the kinetics of the size dependence of their volume change. In order to copy the natural skeletal muscle design into a new artificial muscle system this study is divided into two steps. The first step is the development of a comprehensive study of the hydrogel itself in order to obtain the elementary background needed for the design of actuating devices based on this material. The effect of polymerization parameter on the hydrogel properties is investigated. The electrochemical properties and actuation mechanisms of the hydrogel is studied, the bending of PAAM actuators induced by electric field is discussed and a mechanism for the bending phenomenon is proposed. The second step is the proposition of a new artificial muscle architecture based on PAAM hydrogel. The model consists on a fiber like elements of hydrolyzed PAAM, working in parallel, embedded in a thin conducting gel layer which plays the role of electrodes. The fiber-like elements enable the system to exhibit relatively rapid response and the gel layers enhance their mechanical properties. Aiming to realize the model we have put in place a new electrospinning setup which is a modified process for the production of micro to nanofibers via electrostatic fiber spinning of polymer solutions. The main advantage of this technology is to produce aligned electrospun fibers over large areas by simple and a low cost process making it possible to produce fiberbased devices efficiently and economically. Using this setup, we succeeded in the fabrication of electroactive crosslinked hydrogel microfibers that can achieve fast electroactive response
