We present an electrically actuated tunable optical grating based on dielectric elastomer actuators. A simple fabrication protocol is presented, which integrates the grating with the actuating mechanism both made of soft elastomers, improving the tunability of the grating. The device is designed to be operated in the transmission mode. It exhibits a continuous period tunability of 34.4% at an a...

A systematic, statistical-mechanics-based analysis of the response of dielectric elastomers to coupled electromechanical loading is conducted, starting from the monomer level through the polymer chain and ending with closed-form expressions for the polarization and stress fields. It is found that the apparent response at the macrolevel is dictated by four microscopic parameters-the monomer type...

In this paper, we investigated the temperature-dependent viscoelastic behavior of dielectric elastomers (DEs) and the effects of viscoelasticity on the electro-actuation behavior. We performed dynamic thermomechanical analysis to measure the master curve of the stress relaxation function and the temperature dependence of the relaxation time of VHB 4905, a commonly used DE. The master curve was ...

Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) are a promising soft actuator technology for robotics. Adding robotic functionalities—folding, variable stiffness, and adhesion—into their actuator design is a novel method to create functionalized robots with simplified actuator configurations. We first propose a foldable actuator that has a simple antagonistic DEA configuration allowing bidirectional actu...

A novel method for the fabrication of dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) combines acrylic polymers and single wall carbon nanotube network electrodes. DEAs made using this technique do not require prestretching, have extremely thin electrodes, and can be actuated at low voltage. The method is applied to create a multimorph device with nine actuation modes based on just four inputs.

When a voltage is applied to a layer of a dielectric elastomer, the layer reduces in thickness and expands in area. A recent experiment has shown that the homogeneous deformation of the layer can be unstable, giving way to an inhomogeneous deformation, such that regions of two kinds coexist in the layer, one being flat and the other wrinkled. To analyze this instability, we construct for a clas...

A membrane of a dielectric elastomer coated with compliant electrodes may form wrinkles as the applied voltage is ramped up. We present a combination of experiment and theory to investigate the transition to wrinkles using a clamped membrane subject to a constant force and a voltage ramp. Two types of transitions are identified. In type-I transition, the voltage–stretch curve is N-shaped, and f...

It is previously known that under inflation alone a spherical rubber membrane balloon may bifurcate into a pear shape when the tension in the membrane reaches a maximum, but the existence of such a maximum depends on the material model used: the maximum exists for the Ogden model, but does not exist for the neoHookean, Mooney-Rivlin or Gent model. This paper discusses how such a situation is ch...