Related papers: Tuning the pull-in instability of soft dielectric …
We address the mechanics of an elastic ribbon subjected to twist and tensile load. Motivated by the classical work of Green and a recent experiment that discovered a plethora of morphological instabilities, we introduce a comprehensive…
The design and control of soft robots operating in fluid environments requires a careful understanding of the interplay between large elastic body deformations and hydrodynamic forces. Here we show that this interplay leads to novel…
Application of isotropic pressure or uniaxial strain alters the elastic properties of materials; sufficiently large strains can drive structural transformations. Linear elasticity describes stability against infinitesimal strains, while…
We model within the framework of finite elasticity two inherent instabilities observed in liquid crystal elastomers under uniaxial tension. First is necking which occurs when a material sample suddenly elongates more in a small region where…
We analyse here the problem of large deformation of dielectric elastomeric membranes under coupled electromechanical loading. Extremely large deformations (enclosed volume changes of 100 times and greater) of a toroidal membrane are studied…
Cracks, the major vehicle for material failure, tend to accelerate to high velocities in brittle materials. In three-dimensions, cracks generically undergo a micro-branching instability at about 40% of their sonic limiting velocity. Recent…
We explore the undamped response of step-voltage driven parallel plates and fixed-fixed microbeams. We consider a third order correction in the parallel plate system as a reduced order system to model mid-plane stretching in fixed-fixed…
Spontaneous material shape changes, such as swelling, growth or thermal expansion, can be used to trigger dramatic elastic instabilities in thin shells. These instabilities originate in geometric incompatibility between the preferred…
In recent years there has been renewed interest in the behavior of dislocations in crystals that exhibit strong atomic scale disorder, as typical of compositionally complex single phase alloys. The behavior of dislocations in such crystals…
Predicting the macroscopic mechanical behavior of polymeric materials from the micro-structural features has remained a challenge for decades. Existing theoretical models often fail to accurately capture the experimental data, due to…
Biological soft tissues exhibit elastic properties which can be dramatically different from rubber-type materials (elastomers). To gain a better understanding of the role of constitutive relationships in determining material responses under…
Uniaxial elastomers are characterized by five elastic constants. If their elastic modulus C_5 describing the energy of shear strains in planes containing the anisotropy axis vanishes, they are said to be soft. In spatial dimensions d less…
This paper concerns the rigorous periodic homogenization for a weakly coupled electroelastic system of a nonlinear electrostatic equation with an elastic equation enriched with electrostriction. Such coupling is employed to describe…
The natural impedance, or dynamic relationship between force and motion, of a human operator can determine the stability of exoskeletons that use interaction-torque feedback to amplify human strength. While human impedance is typically…
The effective elasticity of highly charged stiff polyelectrolytes is studied in the presence of counterions, with and without added salt. The rigid polymer conformations may become unstable due to an effective attraction induced by…
Incremental stiffness characterizes the variation of a material's force response to a small deformation change. Typically materials have an incremental stiffness that is fixed and positive, but recent technologies, such as super-lenses, low…
In liquid-crystalline elastomers, the nematic order parameter and the induced strain vary smoothly across the isotropic-nematic transition, without the expected first-order discontinuity. To investigate this smooth variation, we measure the…
Planning accurate manipulation for deformable objects requires prediction of their state. The prediction is often complicated by a loss of stability that may result in collapse of the deformable object. In this work, stability of a fabric…
We investigate the theoretical nonlinear response, Hessian stability, and possible wrinkling behaviour of a voltage-activated dielectric plate immersed in a tank filled with silicone oil. Fixed rigid electrodes are placed on the top and…
A dynamic mitigation mechanism for instability growth was proposed and discussed in the paper [Phys. Plasmas 19, 024503 (2012)]. In the present paper the robustness of the dynamic instability mitigation mechanism is discussed further. The…