Effect of constrained fibers on electromechanical actuation of charge-controlled dielectric elastomers

¹ School of Mechanical Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University - Xi'an, 710049, China
² State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University - Xi'an, 710049, China
³ State Key Laboratory for Strength and Vibration of Mechanical Structures, Xi'an Jiaotong University Xi'an, 710049, China

^(a) hlchen@mail.xjtu.edu.cn (corresponding author)

Received: 11 December 2017
Accepted: 13 February 2018

Abstract

As is known, electromechanical deformation of voltage-controlled dielectric elastomers (DEs) is significant but is susceptible to pull-in and snap-through instabilities, while the large stable deformation can be achieved by spraying charge on DE surfaces, i.e., charge-controlled DEs. In this article, we investigate the effect of constrained fibers on electromechanical actuation of charge-controlled DEs by involving two special deformation modes: uniaxial tension and pure shear state. The coupled effects between the geometrical sizes and the mechanical tensile force of the charge-controlled DEs are also explored. The research results indicate that, different from voltage-controlled DEs, the electromechanical stretch of charge-controlled DEs with constrained fibers does not always show a beneficial merit with respect to that of the charge-controlled DEs without constrained fibers.