Related papers: Exploiting Instabilities to Enable Large Shape Tra…
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.…
Magnetic elastomers deform under a magnetic field, working as a soft actuator. Untethered microbot made of magnetic elastomers have great potentials in performing medical tasks inside human body as mini doctors. However, the lack of a…
We show that a smooth giant voltage actuation of soft dielectric plates is not easily obtained in practice. In principle one can exploit, through pre-deformation, the snap-through behavior of their loading curve to deliver a large stretch…
Ferromagnetic elastic slender structures offer the potential for large actuation displacements under modest external magnetic fields, due to the magneto-mechanical coupling. This paper investigates the phase portraits of the Hamiltonian…
The stability and axisymmetric deformation of two immiscible, viscous, perfect or leaky dielectric fluids confined in the annulus between two concentric cylinders are studied in the presence of radial electric fields. The fields are set up…
Understanding of fundamental physics of plasmonic instabilities is the key issue for the design of a new generation of compact electronic devices required for numerous THz applications. Variable width plasmonic devices have emerged as…
Soft robotic systems offer benefits over traditional rigid systems through reduced contact trauma with soft tissues and by enabling access through tortuous paths in minimally invasive surgery. However, the inherent deformability of soft…
In the present study we investigate electrostatic stabilization mechanisms acting on stratified fluids. Electric fields have been shown to control and even suppress the Rayleigh-Taylor instability when a heavy fluid lies above lighter…
Several experiments have demonstrated the existence of an electro-mechanical effect in many biological tissues and hydrogels, and its actual influence on growth, migration, and pattern formation. Here, to model these interactions and…
This paper develops the equilibrium equations describing the flexoelectric effect in soft dielectrics under large deformations. Previous works have developed related theories using a flexoelectric coupling tensor of mixed material-spatial…
We propose theoretical and numerical analyses of smart bending deformation of a dielectric-elastic bilayer in response to a voltage, based on the nonlinear theory of electro-elasticity and the associated linearized incremental field theory.…
Buckling at the micro and nanoscale generates distant bistable states which can be beneficial for sensing, shape-reconfiguration and mechanical computation applications. Although different approaches have been developed to access buckling…
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 investigate the stability of a circular electrodes-coated dielectric membrane under the combined action of an electric field and all-round in-plane tension. It is known that such a membrane is susceptible to the limiting point…
Soft robots could bring robotic systems to new horizons, by enabling safe human-machine interaction. For precise control, these soft structures require high level position feedback that is not easily achieved through conventional…
Weakly conducting dielectric liquid drops suspended in another dielectric liquid and subject to an applied uniform electric field exhibit a wide range of dynamical behaviors contingent on field strength and material properties. These…
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…
Freestanding tubular crystals offer a general description of crystalline order on deformable surfaces with cylindrical topology, such as single-walled carbon nanotubes, microtubules, and recently reported colloidal assemblies. These systems…
Liquid crystal elastomers represent a novel class of programmable shape-transforming materials whose shape change trajectory is encoded in the material's nematic director field. Using three-dimensional nonlinear finite element…
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…