Electro- and Magneto-Mechanics of Soft Solids : Constitutive Modelling, Numerical Implementations, and Instabilities

This book examines the electro- and magneto-mechanics of soft composite materials and structures, and focuses on magnetorheological elastomers (MREs) and dielectric elastomer composites (DECs), which are composite materials that comprise ferromagnetic and high-dielectric/conducting filler nano- and micro-particles embedded in a soft polymeric matrix.

This gives rise to a coupled magneto- and electro-mechanical response at the macroscopic (order of millimeters and larger) scale when they are subjected to magneto- electro-mechanical external stimuli.

While such MRE and DEC materials and devices can become unstable at some critical electro-magneto-mechanical loading, their response may be well controlled in the post-instability regime.

Moreover, recent advances on the complete electro-magneto-mechanical coupling are presented.

All those aforementioned features motivate the operation of these devices in this unstable region to obtain controlled pattern formation, soft robotic motion andartificial muscles, controllable band-gap acoustic and electromagnetic properties, energy harvesting as well as actively controlled stiffness (for cell-growth).

The book contains four individual chapters covering work on the fundamentals (O.

Lopez-Pamies) and the modeling (M. Gei) of electroactive solids, the modeling of magnetoactive solids (K.

Danas), and the analysis of elastic instabilities (Y.

Fu).