Publication 25-CNA-011

Soft Electromechanical Elastomers Impervious to Instability

Daniel Katusele
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
dkatusel@andrew.cmu.edu

Carmel Majidi
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Kaushik Dayal
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Center for Nonlinear Analysis
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Kaushik.Dayal@cmu.edu

Pradeep Sharma
Department of Mechanical Engineering
University of Houston
Houston, Texas 77004
psharma@uh.edu

Abstract: Soft dielectric elastomers that can exhibit extremely large deformations under the action of an electric field enable applications such as soft robotics, biomedical devices, energy harvesting among others. A key impediment in the use of dielectric elastomers is failure through instability mechanisms or dielectric breakdown. In this work, using a group-theory based approach, we provide a closed-form solution to the bifurcation problem of a paradigmatical elastomer actuator and discover an interesting result: at a critical electric field, the elastomer becomes impervious to Treloar-Kearsley instability. This limit is reached prior to the typical dielectric breakdown threshold. Our results thus establish a regime of electrical and mechanical loads where the dielectric elastomer is invulnerable to all common failure modes.

Get the paper in its entirety as  25-CNA-011.pdf

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