Related papers: Tuning the pull-in instability of soft dielectric …
Charged colloidal crystals exhibit a subtle interplay between electrostatic screening and elastic deformation. In an anisotropic elastic medium the coupling between dilation and the local ionic environment becomes direction dependent,…
In the present work, the overall nonlinear elastic behavior of a 1D multi-modular structure incorporating possible imperfections at the discrete (micro-scale) level, is derived with respect to both tensile and compressive applied loads. The…
This paper investigates the lateral pull-in effect of an in-plane overlap-varying transducer. The instability is induced by the translational and rotational displacements. Based on the principle of virtual work, the equilibrium conditions…
The model of Zhao and Suo can be readily generalized to predict the critical breakdown electric field $E_c$ value of elastomers with arbitrary elastic strain energy function. An explicit expression for $E_c$ is presented for elastomeric…
Dielectric elastomers are an emerging class of highly deformable electro-active materials employed for electromechanical transduction technology. For practical applications, the design of such transducers requires a model accounting for…
In this article we address the problem of Euler's buckling instability in a charged semi-flexible polymer that is under the action of a compressive force. We consider this instability as a phase transition and investigate the role of…
We investigate the PDE system resulting from even electromechanical coupling in elastomers. Assuming a periodic microstructure and a periodic distribution of micro-charges of a prescribed order, we derive the homogenized system. The results…
We identify three dimeric proteins whose mechanostability is anisotropic and should exceed 1 nN along some directions. They come with distinct mechanical clamps: shear-based, involving a cystine slipknot, and due to dragging of a cystine…
Electrostatic and Casimir interactions limit the range of positional stability of electrostatically-actuated or capacitively-coupled mechanical devices. We investigate this range experimentally for a generic system consisting of a…
An important performance metric for series-elastic actuators is the range of impedance which they can safely render. Advanced torque control, using techniques such as the disturbance observer, improve torque tracking bandwidth and accuracy,…
When liquid-crystal elastomers are prepared without any alignment, disordered polydomain structures emerge as the materials are cooled into the nematic phase. These polydomain structures have been attributed to quenched disorder in the…
Constitutive modeling of dielectric elastomers has been of long standing interest in mechanics. Over the last two decades rigorous constitutive models have been developed that couple the electrical response of these polymers with large…
The accurate measurement of fracture resistance in elastomers is essential for predicting the mechanical limits of soft devices. Usually, this is achieved by performing tearing or peeling experiments on thin-sheet samples. Here, we show…
Fluid transport in microfluidic systems typically is laminar due to the low Reynolds number characteristic of the flow. The inclusion of suspended polymers imparts elasticity to fluids, allowing instabilities to be excited when substantial…
The application of pure torsion to a long and thin cylindrical rod is known to provoke a twisting instability, evolving from an initial kink to a knot. In the torsional parallel-plate rheometry of stubby cylinders, the geometrical…
For monodomain nematic elastomers, we construct generalised elastic-nematic constitutive models combining purely elastic and neoclassical-type strain-energy densities. Inspired by recent developments in stochastic elasticity, we extend…
A scaling analysis is undertaken for the load balance in sliding friction in the hydrodynamic lubrication regime, with a particular emphasis on power-law shear-thinning typical of a structured liquid. It is argued that the shear-thinning…
In this work, the Cosserat formulation of geometrically exact beam dynamics is extended by adding the electric potential as an additional degree of freedom to account for the electromechanical coupling in the Dielectric Elastomer Actuators…
We model polydomain liquid-crystal elastomers by extending the neo-classical soft and semi-soft free energies used successfully to describe monodomain samples. We show that there is a significant difference between polydomains cross-linked…
Based on spatial-temporal resolved measurements of the stress field at crack tip based on polarized optical microscopy (str-POM), the stress analysis approach to elastomeric fracture uncovers new insights. We show new phenomenology in…