Issue 26, 2017

Avoiding the pull-in instability of a dielectric elastomer film and the potential for increased actuation and energy harvesting

Abstract

Pull-in instability often occurs when a film of a dielectric elastomer is subjected to an electric field. In this work, we concoct a set of simple, experimentally implementable, conditions that render the dielectric elastomer film impervious to pull-in instability for all practical loading conditions. We show that a uniaxially pre-stretched film has a significantly large actuation stretch in the direction perpendicular to the pre-stretch and find that the maximal specific energy of a dielectric elastomer generator can be increased from 6.3 J gāˆ’1 to 8.3 J gāˆ’1 by avoiding the pull-in instability.

Graphical abstract: Avoiding the pull-in instability of a dielectric elastomer film and the potential for increased actuation and energy harvesting

Article information

Article type
Communication
Submitted
16 mar. 2017
Accepted
28 maí 2017
First published
01 jún. 2017

Soft Matter, 2017,13, 4552-4558

Avoiding the pull-in instability of a dielectric elastomer film and the potential for increased actuation and energy harvesting

S. Yang, X. Zhao and P. Sharma, Soft Matter, 2017, 13, 4552 DOI: 10.1039/C7SM00542C

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