Related papers: Tuning the pull-in instability of soft dielectric …
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…
A layer of dielectric elastomer can be voltage actuated to behave as actuators, but needs to avoid the electromechanical instability of excessively thin down accompanied with electric breakdown. We develop a true method to analyze the…
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…
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,…
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…
In the field of soft dielectric elastomers, the notion electrostriction indicates the dependency of the permittivity on strain. The present paper is aimed at investigating the effects of electrostriction onto the stability behaviour of…
We investigate the ture electromechanical stability of dielectric elastomer actuators by considering the competition between Maxwell and mechanical stresses. Existing researches based on the positive defiiteness of the nominal Hessian…
We propose a protocol to model accurately the electromechanical behavior of dielectric elastomer membranes using experimental data of stress-stretch and voltage-stretch tests. We show how the relationship between electric displacement and…
This paper presents an in-depth examination of the nonlinear deformation induced by dielectric actuation in pre-stressed ideal dielectric elastomers. A nonlinear ordinary differential equation that governs this deformation is formulated…
Soft elastomers that can exhibit extremely large deformations under the action of an electric field are essential for applications such as soft robotics, stretchable and flexible electronics, energy harvesting among others. The critical…
We investigate the finite bending and the associated bending instability of an incompressible dielectric slab subject to a combination of applied voltage and axial compression, using nonlinear electro-elasticity theory and its incremental…
We examine the stability of a soft dielectric plate deformed by the coupled effects of a mechanical pre-stress applied on its lateral faces and an electric field applied through its thickness under charge control. The electric field is…
Statistical mechanics is an important tool for understanding polymer electroelasticity because the elasticity of polymers is primarily due to entropy. However, a common approach for the statistical mechanics of polymer chains, the Gaussian…
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…
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…
A dielectric elastomer whose edges are held fixed will buckle, given sufficient applied voltage, resulting in a nontrivial out-of-plane deformation. We study this situation numerically using a nonlinear elastic model which decouples two 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…
Electrostatic actuators are simple but important switching devices for MEMS applications. Due to the difficulties associated with the electrostatic nonlinearity, precise mathematical description is often hard to obtain for the dynamics of…
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…
We consider the dynamics of overdamped MEMS devices undergoing the pull-in instability. Numerous previous experiments and numerical simulations have shown a significant increase in the pull-in time under DC voltages close to the pull-in…