Instabilities in liquid crystal elastomers
arXiv:2103.01864 · doi:10.1557/s43577-021-00115-2
Abstract
Stability is an important and fruitful avenue of research for liquid crystal elastomers. At constant temperature, upon stretching, the homogeneous state of a nematic body becomes unstable, and alternating shear stripes develop at very low stress. Moreover, these materials can experience classical mechanical effects, such as necking, void nucleation and cavitation, and inflation instability, which are inherited from their polymeric network. We investigate the following two problems: First, how do instabilities in nematic bodies change from those found in purely elastic solids? Second, how are these phenomena modified if the material constants fluctuate? To answer these questions, we present a systematic study of instabilities occurring in nematic liquid crystal elastomers, and examine the contribution of the nematic component and of fluctuating model parameters that follow probability laws. This combined analysis may lead to more realistic estimations of subsequent mechanical damage in nematic solid materials.
References in corpus (15)
- Disclination-mediated thermo-optical response in nematic glass sheets
- Elasticity of Polydomain Liquid Crystal Elastomers
- Photomechanical coupling in photoactive nematic elastomers
- Slow stress relaxation in randomly disordered nematic elastomers and gels
- A plate theory for nematic liquid crystalline solids
- Actuation of cylindrical nematic elastomer balloons
- Hyperelastic bodies under homogeneous Cauchy stress induced by non-homogeneous finite deformations
- Likely equilibria of stochastic hyperelastic spherical shells and tubes
- Likely striping in stochastic nematic elastomers
- Likely equilibria of the stochastic Rivlin cube
- Likely cavitation in stochastic elasticity
- Giant deformations and soft-inflation in LCE balloons
- Likely chirality of stochastic anisotropic hyperelastic tubes
- Likely oscillatory motions of stochastic hyperelastic solids
- Hyperelastic bodies under homogeneous Cauchy stress induced by three-dimensional non-homogeneous deformations