We analyze electrostatic deformations of rectangular, annular circular, solid circular, and elliptic micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) by modeling them as elastic membranes. The nonlinear Poisson equation governing their deformations is solved numerically by the meshless local Petrov–Galerkin (MLPG) method. A local symmetric augmented weak formulation of the problem is introduced, and esse...

It is well known that incident photons carrying momentum ℏk exert a positive photon pressure. But if light is impinging from a negative refractive medium in which ℏk is directed toward the source of radiation, should light exert a photon "tension" instead of a photon pressure? Using an ab initio method that takes the underlying microstructure of a material into account, we find that when an ele...

In this paper we study a two-phase free boundary problem for a semilinear elliptic equation on a bounded domain $Dsubset mathbb{R}^{n}$ with smooth boundary‎. ‎We give some results on the growth of solutions and characterize the free boundary points in terms of homogeneous harmonic polynomials using a fundamental result of Caffarelli and Friedman regarding the representation of functions whose ...

In part I of this work, we presented a theory for adhesionless contact of a pressurized neo-Hookean plane-strain membrane to a rigid substrate. Here, we extend our theory to include adhesion using a fracture mechanics approach. This theory is used to study contact hysteresis commonly observed in experiments. Detailed analysis is carried out to highlight the differences between frictionless and ...