Abstract
Recent research has shown that hierarchical laminated composites can be profitably employed to improve the actuation performance of electrically-activated soft dielectric transducers. This note focuses on two types of rank-two layouts composed of ideal dielectric phases which follow nonlinear hyper-elastic mechanical behaviour and aims at providing a simplified set of solving equations for voltage-controlled actuation. We obtain such equations by analytical manipulations allowing to partly uncouple the set of equations usually employed within this theoretical framework. By focusing on neo-Hookean hyper-elasticity, we validate the proposed methodology with the results available in literature for one layout. For the other layout, we obtain new configurations by maximising the axial stretch. In both cases, we study the sensitivity of the optimal actuation stretch to changes of the parameters characterising the rank-two meso- and micro-structures. In average, the computational time required to reach a convergent solution with the new methodology is one order of magnitude lower than that necessary to solve the whole set of nonlinear coupled equations.
Highlights
The use of hierarchical composites is a possible solution to the quest for the enhancement of actuation performance of soft electroactive materials
The effectiveness of nested layered electro-elastic composites in achieving this goal has been made evident in a set of contributions [1,2,3,4,5] where emerging shortcomings, mainly associated with amplification of local electric fields and the risk of onset of damage at internal interfaces, have been highlighted
Generic dielectric rank-N laminates, where N is the hierarchical order, subjected to a given electric field are thoroughly analysed by Tian et al [2] in the linear elastic regime
Summary
The use of hierarchical composites is a possible solution to the quest for the enhancement of actuation performance of soft electroactive materials. The actuation performance here of interest can be estimated by just solving the mesoscopic rank-one problem through the coupling between the external boundary prescriptions expressed in terms of macroscopic quantities and the electro-mechanical continuity conditions at the interface characterising the laminate meso-structure. The goal of this investigation, pursued, is to analytically simplify at lowest terms the set of nonlinear coupled equations to solve the electro-elastic rank-two problem for voltage-controlled actuation. We assess the computational efficiency of the proposed reduced system of solving equations by comparing its performance with that of the fully coupled nonlinear equations usually employed in literature
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