Electro-elastocapillary Rayleigh–plateau instability in dielectric elastomer films

Seifi, Saman; Park, Harold S.

doi:10.1039/c7sm00917h

Cited by 18 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The staggered formulation was shown to give identical solutions to the monolithic formulation for a range of problems involving electromechanical instabilities, though obviously at a significant reduction in computational expense. While the monolithic formulation has enabled significant insights into the electromechanics of dielectric elastomers for 2D, plane strain problems [11,10,22,36], very few studies on such instabilities have been per-formed in 3D. We anticipate this is where the presently proposed staggered formulation will enable the most significant new insights into the electromechanical behavior of dielectric elastomers.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…We note, as shown in Simo et al [35], that no additional degrees of freedom or changes in quadrature points are needed as a result of the Q1P0 formulation. The dynamic formulation was primarily used in previous works [9,10,11,22,36] due to its ability to capture the evolution and post-instability response for electromechanical instabilities.…”

Section: Nonlinear Monolithic Finite Element Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A staggered explicit–implicit finite element formulation for electroactive polymers

Seifi

Park

2018

Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering

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Electroactive polymers such as dielectric elastomers (DEs) have attracted significant attention in recent years. Computational techniques to solve the coupled electromechanical system of equations for this class of materials have universally centered around fully coupled monolithic formulations, which while generating good accuracy requires significant computational expense. However, this has significantly hindered the ability to solve large scale, fully three-dimensional problems involving complex deformations and electromechanical instabilities of DEs. In this work, we provide theoretical basis for the effectiveness and accuracy of staggered explicit-implicit finite element formulations for this class of electromechanically coupled materials, and elicit the simplicity of the resulting staggered formulation. We demonstrate the stability and accuracy of the staggered approach by solving complex electromechanically coupled problems involving electroactive polymers, where we focus on problems involving electromechanical instabilities such as creasing, wrinkling, and bursting drops. In all examples, essentially identical results to the fully monolithic solution are obtained, showing the accuracy of the staggered approach at a significantly reduced computational cost.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Nonlinear Monolithic Finite Element Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

A staggered explicit–implicit finite element formulation for electroactive polymers

Seifi

Park

2018

Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering

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“…In addition to pull-in instability for a homogeneous deformation, surface instabilities, which lead to inhomogeneous deformation (wrinkling), are also common. Given the existence of an extensive body of work on the electromechanical instabilities related to inhomogeneous deformations, we simply point to a small sample of the works that the reader may consult (and the references therein): [19,22,29,[103][104][105][106][107][108][109][110][111][112][113][114][115][116][117][118].…”

Section: Example 2: Wrinkle Surface Instability Of a Dielectric Elast...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An approximation used here is that Div (σ M ) = 0 [19,108]. With the constraint, u 1,1 + u 2,2 = 0, we have Div (∇u T ) = 0.…”

Section: Solution Of the Incremental Boundary-value Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

A tutorial on the stability and bifurcation analysis of the electromechanical behaviour of soft materials

Yang¹,

Sharma²

2020

Preprint

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Soft materials, such as liquids, polymers, foams, gels, colloids, granular materials, and most soft biological materials, play an important role in our daily lives. From a mechanical viewpoint, soft materials can easily achieve large deformations due to their low elastic moduli; meanwhile, surface instabilities, including wrinkles, creases, folds, and ridges, among others, are often observed.In particular, soft dielectrics when subjected to electrical stimuli can achieve significantly large deformations that are often accompanied by instabilities. While instabilities are conventionally thought to cause failures in the engineering context and carry a negative connotation, they can also be harnessed for various applications such as surface patterning, giant actuation strain, and energy harvesting. In the biological world, instability and bifurcation phenomena often precede important events such as endocytosis, cell fusion, among others. Stability and bifurcation analysis (especially for soft materials) is challenging and often presents a formidable barrier to entry in this important field. A multidisciplinary audience may lack the background in one or more areas that are needed to carry out the requisite modeling or even understand papers in the literature. Furthermore, combining electrostatics together with large deformations brings its own challenges. In this article, we provide a tutorial on the basics of stability and bifurcation analysis in the context of soft electromechanical materials. The aim of the article is to use simple examples and "gently" lead a reader, unfamiliar with either stability analysis or electrostatics of deformable media, to develop the ability to understand the pertinent literature that already exists and position them to embark on the state-of-the-art research on this topic.

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“…The electrical breakdown and rupture limits are applied to the post tension loss states of the DE transducer to predict the operational limits. There are other instabilities identified for a dielectric elastomer transducer, like Rayleigh-Plateau instability [24] that arises due to the surface tension of the elastomer and snap-through instability experienced by an inflated diaphragm configuration of DE [25]. These instabilities maybe also analysed in a similar fashion to the post tension loss analysis, but are out of the scope of this paper.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Operational limits of a non-homogeneous dielectric elastomer transducer

Mathew

Koh

2017

International Journal of Smart and Nano Materials

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Operation of a dielectric elastomer (DE) transducer is limited by the way it fails, and any other limits imposed by the user. For example, material rupture and dielectric breakdown are two examples of transducer failure, while tension loss is a user-imposed limit. Electromechanical instability may or may not result in transducer failure, but is often considered as a boundary to denote the onset of state transition. For a DE undergoing homogeneous deformation, constructing operational limits on work-conjugate state diagrams are rather straightforward. However, for DE subjected to non-homogeneous deformation, the process is more complex. We present a method to plot the operational boundaries of a DE subject to non-homogeneous deformation, known commonly as the Universal Muscle Actuator or the loudspeaker configuration. Our analysis show that tension loss need not be imposed as a hard operational limit, and that there is further operational space for the transducer, post tension loss. By plotting the operational limits on work-conjugate planes, we determine an optimal inner-to-outer ring ratio and the required pre-stretches that maximize energy conversion.

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Electro-elastocapillary Rayleigh–plateau instability in dielectric elastomer films

Cited by 18 publications

References 22 publications

A staggered explicit–implicit finite element formulation for electroactive polymers

A staggered explicit–implicit finite element formulation for electroactive polymers

A tutorial on the stability and bifurcation analysis of the electromechanical behaviour of soft materials

Operational limits of a non-homogeneous dielectric elastomer transducer

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