NUMERICAL MODELING FOR STATIC AND DYNAMIC ANALYSIS OF DIELECTRIC ELASTOMER ACTUATORS

Abstract

Soft dielectric elastomers are widely employed to build smart devices controlled by electrical potential difference. They find applications in several fields of engineering, ranging from mechanical to biomedical. Most of the work done for the simulation of the behavior of the dielectric elastomer utilize the monolithic formulation for this multiphysics problem, which requires large amount of computational power. This fact significantly limits the ability to simulate complex three dimensional dynamic problems involving complex loading and electromechanical instabilities of DEA. Some recent researches have shown that staggered formulation for the problem can very well reduce the computational time for multiphysics problem and can tackle the electromechanical instabilities very accurately in case of Dielectric Elastomer. In the present study, staggered formulation, in conjunction with the mixed formulation to alleviate the problem of volumetric locking has been presented for the dielectric elastomer. The formulation has been validated by the known theoretical results available in literature. Same formulation has been used to demonstrate behavior of dielectric elastomers under complex loading and boundary conditions. And computational efficiency and accuracy of the proposed formulation has been studied with respect to the monolithic approach.