Electrical actuators made from films of dielectric elastomers coated on both sides with stretchable electrodes may potentially be applied in microrobotics, tactile and haptic interfaces, as well as in adaptive optical elements. Such actuators with compliant electrodes are sensitive to the pull-in electromechanical instability, limiting operational voltages and attainable deformations. Electrode...

In this paper, natural frequency and response of forced vibration of composite laminated conical shells under different boundary conditions are investigated. To this end, equations of Donnell's thin shell theory are used as governing equations. The analytical Galerkin method together with beam mode shapes as weighting functions is employed to solve the problem. Due to importance of boundary con...

The wrench-closure workspace of parallel cable-driven mechanisms is the set of poses of their mobile platform for which the cables can balance any external wrench. The determination of this workspace is an important issue since the cables can only pull and not push on the mobile platform. This paper deals with the wrench-closure workspace of six-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) parallel mechanisms driv...

We analyze transient finite electroelastodynamic deformations of a perfect electrically conducting undamped clamped–clamped beam, a clamped–clamped parabolic arch and a clamped–clamped bell-shaped arch suspended over a flat rigid semi-infinite perfect conductor. The pull-in instability in a beam and the pull-in and the snap-through instabilities in the two arches due to time-dependent potential...