Nematic elastomers are rubbery solids which have liquid crystals incorporated
into their polymer chains. These materials display many unusual mechanical
properties, one such being the ability to form fine-scale microstructure. In
this work, we explore the response of taut and appreciably stressed sheets made
of nematic elastomer. Such sheets feature two potential instabilities -- the
formation of fine-scale material microstructure and the formation of fine-scale
wrinkles. We develop a theoretical framework to study these sheets that
accounts for both instabilities, and we implement this framework numerically.
Specifically, we show that these instabilities occur for distinct mesoscale
stretches, and observe that microstructure is finer than wrinkles for
physically relevant parameters. Therefore, we relax (i.e., implicitly but
rigorously account for) the microstructure while we regularize (i.e., compute
the details explicitly) the wrinkles. Using both analytical and numerical
studies, we show that nematic elastomer sheets can suppress wrinkling by
modifying the expected state of stress through the formation of microstructure.Comment: 37 page