Related papers: Reconfigurable Shape-Morphing Dielectric Elastomer…
Electroactive soft elastomers require huge electric field for a meaningful actuation. We demonstrate that this can be dramatically reduced and giant deformations can be produced by application of suitably chosen heterogeneous actuators. The…
Dielectric elastomers have significant potential for new technologies ranging from soft robots to biomedical devices, driven by their ability to display complex shape changes in response to electrical stimulus. However, an important…
Tunable optical devices, in particular, varifocal lenses, have important applications in various fields, including imaging and adaptive vision. Recent advances in metasurfaces, which control the wavefront of light using subwavelength-spaced…
Soft electroactive materials can undergo large deformation subjected to either mechanical or electrical stimulus, and hence they can be excellent candidates for designing extremely flexible and adaptive structures and devices. This paper…
Soft dielectric elastomers that can exhibit extremely large deformations under the action of an electric field enable applications such as soft robotics, biomedical devices, energy harvesting among others. A key impediment in the use of…
The ability to control electromagnetic fields on the subwavelength scale could open exciting new venues in many fields of science. Transformation optics provides one way to attain such control through the local variation of the permittivity…
The shape of liquid crystalline elastomers (LCEs) with spatial variation in the director orientation can be transformed by exposure to a stimulus. Here, informed by previously reported analytical treatments, we prepare complex spiral…
It is highly desirable to discover an electromechanical coupling that allows a dielectric material to generate curvature in response to a uniform electric field, which would add a new degree of freedom for designing actuators.…
We consider planar liquid crystal elastomers: two dimensional objects made of anisotropic responsive materials, that upon activation remain flat however change their planar shape. We derive a closed form, analytical solution based on the…
Designing smart devices with tunable shapes has important applications in industrial manufacture. In this paper, we investigate the nonlinear deformation and the morphological transitions between buckling, necking, and snap-through…
A rectangular plate of dielectric elastomer exhibiting gradients of material properties through its thickness will deform inhomogeneously when a potential difference is applied to compliant electrodes on its major surfaces, because each…
Macroscale robotic systems have demonstrated great capabilities of high speed, precise, and agile functions. However, the ability of soft robots to perform complex tasks, especially in centimeter and millimeter scale, remains limited due to…
Manipulating the shape of nanoscale objects in a controllable fashion is at the heart of designing materials that act as building blocks for self-assembly or serve as targeted drug delivery carriers. Inducing shape deformations by…
Liquid crystalline elastomers (LCEs) are shape-changing materials that exhibit large deformations in response to applied stimuli. Local control of the orientation of LCEs spatially directs the deformation of these materials to realize…
Thin bilayers made of elastic sheets with different strain recoveries can be used for dynamic shape morphing through ambient stimuli, such as temperature, mass diffusion, and light. As a fundamentally different approach to designing…
An optically addressable and configurable electrode architecture for dielectric elastomer actuators and arrays is described. It is based on embedding photoconductive, zinc oxide (ZnO) nanowires in the DEA to create electrodes. Normally, a…
The electronic properties of two-dimensional materials and their heterostructures can be dramatically altered by varying the relative angle between the layers. This makes it theoretically possible to realize a new class of twistable…
Dielectric elastomers have recently been proposed for various biologically-relevant applications, in which they may operate in fluidic environments where surface tension effects may have a significant effect on their stability and…
We provide a clear energetic insight into the catastrophic nature of the so-called creasing and pull-in instabilities in soft electro-active elastomers. These phenomena are ubiquitous for thin electro-elastic plates and are a major obstacle…
Amongst the various fascinating types of material behavior featured by magnetic gels and elastomers are magnetostrictive effects. That is, deformations in shape or changes in volume are induced from outside by external magnetic fields.…