Avoiding the pull-in instability of a dielectric elastomer film and the potential for increased actuation and energy harvesting

Shengyou Yang; Xuanhe Zhao; Pradeep Sharma

doi:10.1039/c7sm00542c

Avoiding the pull-in instability of a dielectric elastomer film and the potential for increased actuation and energy harvesting

Soft Matter. 2017 Jul 14;13(26):4552-4558. doi: 10.1039/c7sm00542c. Epub 2017 Jun 19.

Authors

Shengyou Yang¹, Xuanhe Zhao², Pradeep Sharma³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204, USA.
² Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
³ Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204, USA and Department of Physics, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204, USA. psharma@uh.edu.

PMID: 28628169
DOI: 10.1039/c7sm00542c

Abstract

Pull-in instability often occurs when a film of a dielectric elastomer is subjected to an electric field. In this work, we concoct a set of simple, experimentally implementable, conditions that render the dielectric elastomer film impervious to pull-in instability for all practical loading conditions. We show that a uniaxially pre-stretched film has a significantly large actuation stretch in the direction perpendicular to the pre-stretch and find that the maximal specific energy of a dielectric elastomer generator can be increased from 6.3 J g^-1 to 8.3 J g^-1 by avoiding the pull-in instability.