Related papers: Optimisation of hierarchical dielectric elastomer …
The rise of soft materials and additive manufacturing has provided the feasibility of developing elastomer lattices for various engineering applications. Although earlier attempts have been made to manufacture and test the elastomer…
Active solids, more specifically elastic lattices embedded with polar active units, exhibit collective actuation when the elasto-active feedback, generically present in such systems, exceeds some critical value. The dynamics then…
The multi-scale nature of architectured materials raises the need for advanced experimental methods suitable for the identification of their effective properties, especially when their size is finite and they undergo extreme deformations.…
Active metamaterials are a type of metamaterial with tunable properties enabled by structural reconfigurations. Existing active metamaterials often achieve only a limited number of structural reconfigurations upon the application of an…
Pull-in (or electro-mechanical) instability occurs when a drastic decrease in the thickness of a dielectric elastomer results in electrical breakdown, which limits the applications of dielectric devices. Here we derive the criteria for…
Soft adhesive pads are needed for many robotics applications, and one approach is based on electroadhesion. Here we present a general analytic model and numerical results for electroadhesion for soft solids with arbitrary time-dependent…
The goal of this paper is to improve the performance of an electric motor by modifying the geometry of a specific part of the iron core of its rotor. To be more precise, the objective is to smooth the rotation pattern of the rotor. A shape…
In the perspective of developing smart hybrid materials with customized features, ferrogels and magnetorheological elastomers allow a synergy of elasticity and magnetism. The interplay between elastic and magnetic properties gives rise to a…
Biologically inspired pressure actuated cellular structures can alter their shape through pressure variations. Previous work introduced a computational framework for pressure actuated cellular structures which was limited to two cell rows…
This paper investigates a computational strategy for studying the interactions between multiple through-the-width delaminations and global or local buckling in composite laminates taking into account possible contact between the delaminated…
With the growing maturity of additive manufacturing, the fabrication of architected or lattice-based metamaterials has become a reality for industrial applications. These materials combine lightweight design with tailored mechanical…
The classical continuous mixed formulation of linear elasticity with pointwise symmetric stresses allows for a conforming finite element discretization with piecewise polynomials of degree at least three. Symmetric stress approximations of…
Active control of wrinkling in soft film-substrate composites using electric fields is a critical challenge in tunable material systems. Here, we investigate the electro-mechanical instability of a soft dielectric film bonded to a…
Protective applications require energy-absorbing materials that are soft and compressible enough to absorb kinetic energy from impacts, yet stiff enough to bear crushing loads. Achieving this balance requires careful consideration of both…
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…
The elastic wave propagation is investigated in the beam lattice material characterized by a square periodic cell with anti-tetrachiral microstructure. With reference to the Floquet-Bloch spectrum, focus is made on the band structure…
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…
We explore reshaping of nematoelastic films upon imbibing an isotropic solvent under conditions when isotropic and nematic phases coexist. The structure of the interphase boundary is computed taken into account the optimal nematic…
A computationally efficient method is presented for approximate optimization of cutting pattern of frame-supported and pneumatic membrane structures. The plane cutting sheet is generated by minimizing the error from the shape obtained by…
Shell buckling is central in many biological structures and advanced functional materials, even if, traditionally, this elastic instability has been regarded as a catastrophic phenomenon to be avoided for engineering structures. Either way,…