Magneto-active elastic shells with tunable buckling strength

Abstract

Shell buckling is central in many biological structures and advanced functional materials, even if, traditionally, this elastic instability has been regarded as a catastrophic phenomenon to be avoided for engineering structures. Either way, predicting critical buckling conditions remains a long-standing challenge. The subcritical nature of shell buckling imparts extreme sensitivity to material and geometric imperfections. Consequently, measured critical loads are inevitably lower than classic theoretical predictions. Here, we present a robust mechanism to dynamically tune the buckling strength of shells, exploiting the coupling between mechanics and magnetism. Our experiments on pressurized spherical shells made of a magnetorheological elastomer demonstrate the tunability of their buckling pressure via magnetic actuation. We develop a theoretical model for thin magnetic elastic shells, which rationalizes the underlying mechanism, in excellent agreement with experiments. A dimensionless magneto-elastic buckling number is recognized as the key governing parameter, combining the geometrical, mechanical, and magnetic properties of the system.

References in corpus (5)

• Virus shapes and buckling transitions in spherical shells
• How Does A Porous Shell Collapse? Delayed Buckling And Guided Folding Of Inhomogeneous Capsules
• Curvature-Induced Instabilities of Shells
• Probing shells against buckling: a non-destructive technique for laboratory testing
• Buckling instability causes inertial thrust for spherical swimmers at all scales

Cited by in corpus (10)

• A Kirchhoff-like theory for hard magnetic rods under geometrically nonlinear deformation in three dimensions
• A reduced-order, rotation-based model for thin hard-magnetic plates
• Snap buckling of bistable beams under combined mechanical and magnetic loading
• A geometrically exact model for thin magneto-elastic shells
• Probabilistic buckling of imperfect hemispherical shells containing a distribution of defects
• Delayed buckling of spherical shells due to viscoelastic knockdown of the critical load
• Active buckling of pressurized spherical shells : Monte Carlo Simulation
• Discrete differential geometry-based model for nonlinear analysis of axisymmetric shells
• Fluid-induced snap-through instability of spherical shells
• Ringworlds and Dyson spheres can be stable