Related papers: Bending control and instability of functionally gr…
The recent discovery of electro-active polymers has shown great promises in the field of soft robotics, and was logically followed by experimental, numerical and theoretical developments. Most of these studies were concerned with systems…
The elastocapillary instability of a flexible plate plunged in a liquid bath is analysed theoretically. We show that the plate can bend due to two separate destabilizing mechanisms, when the liquid is partially wetting the solid. For…
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…
In this paper, the growth-induced bending deformation of a thin hyperelastic plate is studied. For a plane-strain problem, the governing PDE system is formulated, which is composed of the mechanical equilibrium equations, the constraint…
In the context of finite elasticity, we propose plate models describing the spontaneous bending of nematic elastomer thin films due to variations along the thickness of the nematic order parameters. Reduced energy functionals are deduced…
Mechanical and elastic properties of materials are among the most fundamental quantities for many engineering and industrial applications. Here, we present a formulation that is efficient and accurate for calculating the elastic and bending…
Soft robotics requires materials that are capable of large deformation and amenable to actuation with external stimuli such as electric fields. Energy harvesting, biomedical devices, flexible electronics and sensors are some other…
Well-posedness of a free boundary problem for electrostatic microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) is investigated when nonlinear bending effects are taken into account. The model describes the evolution of the deflection of an electrically…
During the life of animals, epithelial tissues undergo extensive deformations--first to form organs during embryogensis and later to preserve integrity and function in adulthood. To what extent these deformations resemble that of non-living…
The ability to design and fabricate materials with tailored mechanical properties, combined with immunity to damage, is a frontier of materials engineering. For example, materials which are characterized by elastic properties that depend on…
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…
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…
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 develop the fundamentals of nonlinear and anisotropic bending behavior of biomimetic scale plates using a combination of analytical modeling, finite element (FE) computations, and motivational experiments. The analytical…
A new result enables direct calculation of thermoelastic damping in vibrating elastic solids. The mechanism for energy loss is thermal diffusion caused by inhomogeneous deformation, flexure in thin plates. The general result is combined…
We present in this paper a detailed analysis of the flexoelectric instability of a planar nematic layer in the presence of an alternating electric field (frequency $\omega$), which leads to stripe patterns (flexodomains) in the plane of the…
In this work, a higher-order irrotational strain gradient plasticity theory is studied in the small strain regime. A detailed numerical study is based on the problem of simple shear of a non-homogeneous block comprising an elastic-plastic…
Dielectric elastomers (DEs) are a type of multifunctional materials with salient features that are very attractive in developing soft, lightweight, and small-scale transducers and robotics. This paper reviews the mechanics of soft DE…
We investigate the elasticity of unsupported epithelial monolayer and we discover that unlike a thin solid plate, which wrinkles if geometrically incompatible with the underlying substrate, the epithelium may do so even in absence of the…
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…