Giant, voltage-actuated deformation of a dielectric elastomer under dead load

By Jiangshui Huang, Tiefeng Li, Choon Chiang Foo, Jian Zhu, David R. Clarke, Zhigang Suo. 2012

206 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Far greater voltage-actuated deformation is achievable for a dielectric elastomer under equal-biaxial dead load than under rigid constraint usually employed. Areal strains of 488% are demonstrated. The dead load suppresses electric breakdown, enabling the elastomer to survive the snap-through electromechanical instability. The breakdown voltage is found to increase with the voltage ramp rate. A nonlinear model for viscoelastic dielectric elastomers is developed and shown to be consistent with the experimental observations.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Civil and Structural Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/285c82cf28e1eebe0428b79678b51de64f1394a5