Catastrophic thinning of dielectric elastomers

Abstract

We provide a clear energetic insight into the catastrophic nature of the so-called creasing and pull-in instabilities in soft electro-active elastomers. These phenomena are ubiquitous for thin electro-elastic plates and are a major obstacle to the development of giant actuators; yet they are not completely understood nor modelled accurately. Here, in complete agreement with experiments, we give a simple formula to predict the voltage thresholds for these instability patterns and model their shape, and show that equilibrium is impossible beyond their onset. Our analysis is fully analytical, does not require finite element simulations, and can be extended to include pre-stretch and to encompass any material behaviour.

References in corpus (1)

• Comment on ``Method to analyze electromechanical stability of dielectric elastomers" [Appl. Phys. Lett. 91, 061921 (2007)]

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Tuning the pull-in instability of soft dielectric elastomers through loading protocols
• The interplay between symmetry-breaking and symmetry-preserving bifurcations in soft dielectric films and the emergence of giant electro-actuation
• Electrostatically tunable axisymmetric vibrations of soft electro-active tubes
• Architected Elastomer Networks for Optimal Electromechanical Response
• Statistical Mechanical Analysis of the Electromechanical Coupling in an Electrically-Responsive Polymer Chain
• Statistical mechanics of a dielectric polymer chain in the force ensemble
• Bending control and instability of functionally graded dielectric elastomers