A design principle for actuation of nematic glass sheets

TL;DR

This paper introduces a continuum mechanical framework for designing stress-free shapes and director distributions in nematic glass sheets with prescribed spontaneous stretch fields, linking geometry, elasticity, and plasticity theories.

Contribution

It develops a novel theoretical approach to determine stress-free configurations and director fields in nematic glasses based on geometric and mechanical principles.

Findings

Framework for stress-free shape design in nematic glasses

Connections to isometric embedding and plasticity theories

Potential applications in programmable material design

Abstract

A continuum mechanical framework is developed for determining a) the class of stress-free deformed shapes and corresponding director distributions on the undeformed configuration of a nematic glass membrane that has a prescribed spontaneous stretch field and b) the class of undeformed configurations and corresponding director distributions on it resulting in a stress-free \emph{given} deformed shape of a nematic glass sheet with a prescribed spontaneous stretch field. The proposed solution rests on an understanding of how the Lagrangian dyad of a deformation of a membrane maps into the Eulerian dyad in three dimensional ambient space. Interesting connections between these practical questions of design and the mathematical theory of isometric embeddings of manifolds, deformations between two prescribed Riemannian manifolds, and the slip-line theory of plasticity are pointed out.