Liu, M., Gomez, M., & Vella, D.* (2021). Delayed bifurcation in elastic snap-through instabilities. J Mech. Phys. Solids, 151, 104386.
A. Rafsanjani and D. Pasini, Bistable Auxetic Mechanical Metamaterials Inspired by Ancient Geometric Motifs. Extreme Mechanics Letters 9, 291-296 (2016).
We present a monolithic mechanical metamaterial comprising a periodic arrangement of snapping units with tunable tensile behavior. Under tension, the metamaterial undergoes a large extension caused by sequential snap-through instabilities, and exhibits a pattern switch from an undeformed wavy-shape to a diamond configuration.
Engineering actuators with capabilities that match and even exceed those found in nature, is a long-standing challenge. While traditional actuators are built with hard materials, it has been recently shown that elastomeric materials enable the design of fluidic actuators that are lightweight, inexpensive, easy to fabricate, and able to undergo large deformation and complex motions. However, these actuators typically rely on large volumes for their actuation.
For a dielectric elastomer membrane we show giant voltage-triggered expansion of area by 1692%, far beyond the largest values reported in the literature.
Stephan Rudykh (a), (c), Kaushik Bhattacharya (c) and Gal deBotton (a), (b)
Arch-shaped microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) have been used as mechanical memories, micro-relays, micro-valves, optical switches, and digital micro-mirrors. A bi-stable structure, such as an arch, is characterized by a multivalued load deflection curve. Here we study the symmetry breaking, the snap-through instability, and the pull-in instability of a bi-stable arch shaped MEMS under static and dynamic electric loads.<!--break--> Unlike a mechanical load, the electric load is a nonlinear function of the a priori unknown deformed shape of the arch.
