Instabilities in multilayered soft dielectrics

By Katia Bertoldi, Massimiliano Gei. 2011

174 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Experimental observations clearly show that the performance of dielectric elastomeric-based devices can be considerably improved using composite materials. A critical issue in the development of composite dielectric materials toward applications is the prediction of their failure mechanisms due to the applied electromechanical loads. In this paper we investigate analytically the influence of electromechanical finite deformations on the stability of multilayered soft dielectrics under plane-strain conditions. Four different criteria are considered: (i) loss of positive definiteness of the tangent electroelastic constitutive operator, (ii) existence of diffuse modes of bifurcation (microscopic modes), (iii) loss of strong ellipticity of the homogenized continuum (localized or macroscopic modes), and (iv) electric breakdown. While the formulation is developed for generic isotropic hyperelastic dielectrics, results are presented for the special class of ideal dielectrics incorporating a neo-Hookean elastic response. The effect of material properties and loading conditions is investigated, providing a detailed picture of the different possible failure modes.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Civil and Structural Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c834607ad3fe3a91e9afd9f22e353d064e2c48f7

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Citations in the corpus

Effect of mechanical pre-stretch on the stabilization of dielectric elastomer actuation (2011, background): “Electrically speaking, the pull-in instability occurs when the mechanical stress, due to the squeezing force from the attraction of the electrodes, exceeds a critical value which is unbalanced by the dielectric’s elasticity [20].”
Modeling of dielectric elastomers: Design of actuators and energy harvesting devices (2013, background): “This work opens the door for further simulation-based study of complex dielectric elastomeric structures and serves as platform for studying dielectric-elastomer-based composites (Zhang et al., 2002; deBotton et al., 2007; Bertoldi and Gei, 2011; Ponte Castañeda and Siboni, 2012), dissipative effect”
Theory of dielectric elastomers (2010, methodology): “Stability analysis has also been carried out by considering inhomogeneous perturbation([67,68]).”
Giant voltage-induced deformation in dielectric elastomers near the verge of snap-through instability (2013, unknown): “Electromechanical instability is affected by both material models and boundary conditions (e.g., Zhao et al., 2007; Diaz-Calleja et al., 2008; Leng et al., 2009; De Tommasi et al., 2010; Xu et al., 2010; Bertoldi and Gei, 2011; Rudykh, et al., 2012; Yong et al., 2012).”