Cephalopod-inspired Design of Electro-mechano-chemically Responsive Elastomers for On-demand Fluorescent Patterning
Qiming Wang, Gregory R. Gossweiler, Stephen L. Craig*, Xuanhe Zhao*
A highly deformable capacitor made of a soft dielectric and two conformal
electrodes can switch between two states discontinuously, by a first-order transition, as the total
charge varies gradually. When the total charge is small, it spreads evenly over the area of the
capacitor, and the capacitor deforms homogeneously. When the total charge is large, it localizes in
a small region of the capacitor, and this region thins down preferentially. The capacitor will
I am looking to recruit a new PhD student in the area of computational modeling of soft active materials. The position will begin as early as January 2014, or alternatively in September 2014. Requirements for this position including the ability to program in C++, knowledge of nonlinear finite element methods and continuum mechanics, and a good background in solid mechanics. If interested, please contact me at parkhs(at)bu.edu, with a copy of a CV and a description of your previous research experience.
My company urgently needs to identify an individual or organization who can
fabricate a couple of hundred small Dielectric Elastomer transducers for an
R&D project. The work could be done under contract. We have
started making our own but it is becoming clear there is a learning curve plus
much trial and error and we are short on time.
If you think you might be able to make them or if you can suggest
Soft dielectric elastomer is able to generate an
electromechanical response in terms of reversible shape
changing, which is a muscle-like behavior. The deformation
and electromechanical stability of dielectric elastomers,
classified by their deformation modes, uniaxial extension,
equal biaxial expansion and pure shear, are investigated.
Pull-in instability occurs in equal biaxial and uniaxial modes
at a small stretch ratio, while the pure shear mode features
wrinkling instability after a large stable deformation. The
Recently accepted for publication in Soft Matter:
(http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2013/SM/C2SM27375F)
The dielectric constant is an essential electrical parameter to the
achievable voltage-induced deformation of the dielectric
elastomer. This paper primarily focuses on the temperature
dependence of the dielectric constant (within the range of 173 K
to 373 K) for the most widely used acrylic dielectric
elastomer (VHB 4910). First the dielectric constant was investigated
experimentally with the broadband dielectric spectrometer
(BDS). Results showed that the dielectric constant first increased
with temperature up to a peak value and then dropped to a
relative small value. Then by analyzing the fitted curves, the Cole–Cole
dispersion equation was found better to characterize the
rising process before the peak values than the Debye dispersion
