Related papers: Exploiting Instabilities to Enable Large Shape Tra…
Designing smart devices with tunable shapes has important applications in industrial manufacture. In this paper, we investigate the nonlinear deformation and the morphological transitions between buckling, necking, and snap-through…
Recent experiments have exploited elastic instabilities in membranes to create complex patterns. However, the rational design of such structures poses many challenges, as they are products of nonlinear elastic behavior. We pose a simple…
Under the actions of internal pressure and electric voltage, a spherical dielectric elastomer balloon usually keeps a sphere during its deformation, which has also been assumed in many previous studies. In this article, using linear…
This paper presents an interaction control algorithm for a dielectric elastomer membrane actuator. The proposed method permits efficient exploitation of the controllable stiffness of the material, allowing to use the membrane as a…
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…
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…
Dielectric materials are critical building blocks for modern electronics such as sensors, actuators, and transistors. With rapid advances in soft and stretchable electronics for emerging human- and robot-interfacing applications, there is a…
A challenge in soft robotics and soft actuation is the determination of an elastic system which spontaneously recovers its trivial path during postcritical deformation after a bifurcation. The interest in this behaviour is that a…
We consider bifurcations from the homogeneous solution of a circular or square hyperelastic sheet that is subjected to equibiaxial stretching under either force- or displacement-controlled edge conditions. We derive the condition for…
We study avenues to shape multistability and shape-morphing in flexible crystalline membranes of cylindrical topology, enabled by glide mobility of dislocations. Using computational modeling, we obtain states of mechanical equilibrium…
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…
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…
Soft actuators allow to transform external stimuli to mechanical deformations. Because of their deformational response to external magnetic fields, magnetic gels and elastomers represent ideal candidates for such tasks. Mostly, linear…
Dielectric elastomers (DEs) that couple deformation and electrostatics have the potential for use in soft sensors and actuators with applications ranging from robotic, biomedical, energy, aerospace and automotive technologies. However,…
Dielectric elastomer actuators have become one of the most important smart material transducers in recent times. One of the crucial aspects in this field is the application of bias to find the best operating conditions. The basic task is to…
Nematic elastomers are programmable soft materials that display large, reversible and predictable deformation under an external stimulus such as a change in temperature or light. While much of the work in the field has focused on actuation…
Knots across various length scales, from micro to macro-scales, such as polymers, DNA, shoelaces, and surgery, serving their unique mechanical properties. The shape of ideal knots has been extensively studied in the context of knot theory,…
The application of variational principles for analyzing problems in the physical sciences is widespread. Cantilever-like problems, where one end is fixed and the other end is free, have received less attention in terms of their stability…
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…
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…