A new MOX report entitled “Designing dielectric-elastomer balloons with tunable shapes in response to electro-mechanical stimuli” by Su, Y.; Riccobelli, D.; Chen, Y; Chen, W; Ciarletta, P has appeared in the MOX Report Collection.
The report can be donwloaded at the following link:
https://www.mate.polimi.it/biblioteca/add/qmox/22/2023.pdf
Abstract: Designing smart devices with tunable shapes has important applications in industrial manufacture. In this paper, we investigate the nonlinear deformation and the morphological transitions between buckling and snap-through instabilities of layered DE balloons in response to an applied radial voltage and an inner pressure. We propose a general mathematical theory of nonlinear electro-elasticity able to account for finite inhomogeneous strains provoked by the electro-mechanical coupling. We investigate the onsets of morphological transitions of the spherically symmetric balloons using the surface impedance matrix method. Moreover, we study the post-buckling behavior through numerical simulations using the finite element method. Our analysis demonstrates the possibility to design tunable DE spheres, where the buckling thresholds can be controlled by geometrical and mechanical properties of the passive elastic layers. Relevant applications include soft robotics and mechanical actuators.
