Related papers: Effective behavior of nematic elastomer membranes
We compute effective energies of thin bilayer structures composed by soft nematic elastic-liquid crystals in various geometrical regimes and functional configurations. Our focus is on order-strain interaction in elastic foundations composed…
Instabilities in thin elastic sheets, such as wrinkles, are of broad interest both from a fundamental viewpoint and also because of their potential for engineering applications. Nematic liquid crystal elastomers offer a new form of control…
Wrinkles commonly develop in a thin film deposited on a soft elastomer substrate when the film is subject to compression. Motivated by recent experiments [Agrawal et al., Soft Matter 8, 7138 (2012)] that show how wrinkle morphology can be…
Nematic elastomers are rubbery solids which have liquid crystals incorporated into their polymer chains. These materials display many unusual mechanical properties, one such being the ability to form fine-scale microstructure. In this work,…
In the context of finite elasticity, we propose plate models describing the spontaneous bending of nematic elastomer thin films due to variations along the thickness of the nematic order parameters. Reduced energy functionals are deduced…
Thin dielectric elastomers with compliant electrodes exhibit various types of instability under the action of electromechanical loading. Guided by the thermodynamically-based formulation of Fosdick and Tang (J. Elasticity 88, 255-297,…
We compute the $\Gamma$-limit of energy functionals describing mechanical systems composed of a thin nematic liquid crystal elastomer sustaining a homogeneous and isotropic elastic membrane. We work in the regime of infinitesimal…
Nematic elastomers and glasses deform spontaneously when subjected to temperature changes. This property can be exploited in the design of heterogeneously patterned thin sheets that deform into a non-trivial shape when heated or cooled. In…
We evaluate the effective Hamiltonian governing, at the optically resolved scale, the elastic properties of micro-manipulated membranes. We identify floppy, entropic-tense and stretched-tense regimes, representing different behaviors of the…
We study the effect of boundary rugosity in nematic liquid crystalline systems. We consider a highly general formulation of the problem, able to simultaneously deal with several liquid crystal theories. We use techniques of Gamma…
Using numerical simulations, we characterized the behavior of an elastic membrane immersed in an active fluid. Our findings reveal a nontrivial folding and re-expansion of the membrane that is controlled by the interplay of its resistance…
We introduce a strain-energy based nonlinear hyper-elastic formulation to model the material properties of ultrasoft dielectric elastomers over a wide range of elastic properties, prestretch, and thicknesses. We build on the uniaxial Gent…
We propose a novel variationally consistent membrane wrinkling model for analyzing the mechanical responses of wrinkled thin membranes. The elastic strain energy density is split into tensile and compressive terms via a spectral…
We consider a class of models motivated by previous numerical studies of wrinkling in highly stretched, thin rectangular elastomer sheets. The model used is characterized by a finite-strain hyperelastic membrane energy perturbed by small…
Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are soft phase-changing solids that exhibit large reversible contractions upon heating, Goldstone-like soft modes and resultant microstructural instabilities. We heat a planar LCE slab to isotropic, clamp…
Liquid crystal elastomers realize a fascinating new form of soft matter that is a composite of a conventional crosslinked polymer gel (rubber) and a liquid crystal. These {\em solid} liquid crystal amalgams, quite similarly to their…
How much energy does it take to stamp a thin elastic shell flat? Motivated by recent experiments on the wrinkling patterns of floating shells, we develop a rigorous method via $\Gamma$-convergence for answering this question to leading…
Functionalized thin elastic films and membranes frequently feature internal sites of net forces or stresses. These are, for instance, active sites of actuation, or rigid inclusions in a strained membrane that induce counterstress upon…
We determine stability boundaries for the wrinkling of highly uni-directionally stretched, finely thin, rectangular elastic sheets. For a given fine thickness and length, a stability boundary here is a curve in the parameter plane, aspect…
Compression-induced buckling instability of metal thin films on a compliant base result in surface wrinkles. A stiff thin film, perfectly bonded to an infinitely deep pre-stretched dielectric elastomer (DE) substrate, is considered. Linear…