Compression-induced failure of electro-active polymeric thin films

TL;DR

This paper develops a theoretical framework to analyze compression-induced wrinkling and failure in electro-active polymer thin films, revealing how voltage influences the stability domain and predicting critical voltages for wrinkling.

Contribution

It introduces a general tension field theory-based model for EAP thin films, incorporating voltage effects and Mooney-Rivlin material assumptions, to predict compression instability and failure.

Findings

The voltage-dependent tensile domain contracts with increasing voltage.

A critical voltage exists where the domain vanishes, causing universal wrinkling.

The model can be implemented in numerical simulations for complex materials.

Abstract

The insurgence of compression induces wrinkling in actuation devices based on EAPs thin films leading to a sudden decrease of performances up to failure. Based on the classical tension field theory for thin elastic membranes, we provide a general framework for the analysis of the insurgence of in-plane compression in membranes of electroactive polymers (EAPs). Our main result is the deduction of a (voltage-dependent) domain in the stretch space which represents tensile configurations. Under the assumption of Mooney-Rivlin materials, we obtain that for growing values of the applied voltage the domain contracts, vanishing at a critical voltage above which the polymer is wrinkled for any stretch configuration. Our approach can be easily implemented in numerical simulations for more complex material behaviors and provides a tool for the analysis of compression instability as a function of the elastic moduli.