Avoiding the pull-in instability of a dielectric elastomer film and the potential for increased actuation and energy harvesting.
basic_science · Level V
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- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 28628169.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1039/c7sm00542c.
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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<sup>-1</sup> to 8.3 J g<sup>-1</sup> by avoiding the pull-in instability.