Avoiding the pull-in instability of a dielectric elastomer film and the potential for increased actuation and energy harvesting.

@article{Yang2017AvoidingTP,
  title={Avoiding the pull-in instability of a dielectric elastomer film and the potential for increased actuation and energy harvesting.},
  author={Shengyou Yang and Xuanhe Zhao and Pradeep Sharma},
  journal={Soft matter},
  year={2017},
  volume={13 26},
  pages={
          4552-4558
        }
}
Pull-in instability often occurs when a film of a dielectric elastomer is subjected to an electric field. In this work, we concoct a set of simple, experimentally implementable, conditions that render the dielectric elastomer film impervious to pull-in instability for all practical loading conditions. We show that a uniaxially pre-stretched film has a significantly large actuation stretch in the direction perpendicular to the pre-stretch and find that the maximal specific energy of a dielectric… 
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