Electromechanical coupling behavior of nano-scale dielectric elastomer actuators

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Dielectric elastomers actuators, emerged as one of the most promising technologies for soft material-based electromechanical transduction, have received much attention due to their light weight, high energy density and large deformation. They have extensive potential applications, such as artificial muscles, adaptive optical elements, soft robots, programmable haptic surfaces, and other biomimetic applications. Despite the fact that unique electromechanical coupling performance has been obtained for these devices, there is limited work on understanding the underlying fundamentals of these soft dielectrics, especially when the size of dielectric elastomers goes to submicro or nano level. To facilitate the full potential applications of these dielectric elastomers as actuators, it is desirable to develop a solid theoretical guidance for the reliable designs. It is, therefore, the objective of the proposed research to develop a robust theoretical framework describing the electromechanical coupling of dielectric elastomers, which is capable of capturing the large deformation, nonlinear material behavior and structure scale features. Meanwhile, an accurate, stable and efficient numerical method will also be developed for actuators with more complex and general configurations. These analytical and numerical methods will be used to characterize the electromechanical coupling of the nano-scale dielectric elastomer actuators. This project is the first to systematically study the electromechanical coupling behavior of dielectric elastomers considering nano-scale structure features. Through this study, we expect to quantitatively "design dielectricity" by exploring miniaturization of existing dielectric elastomer actuators or developing dielectric nanocomposites. The proposed theoretical and numerical approaches will provide a sound base for accurately predicting the electromechanical coupling of dielectric elastomers, thus lead to a better and controlled design for the applications of these smart materials in transduction technologies.