Electroactive soft elastomers require huge electric field for a meaningful actuation. We demonstrate, by means of numerical simulation, that this can be dramatically reduced and large deformations can be achieved with suitably designed heterogeneous actuators. The mechanism by which the enhancement is attained is illustrated with the aid of both idealized and periodic models.
A postdoctoral fellowship funded by the US Air Force is available at the University of Southampton (UK) to work in the area of computational mechanics applied to biomimetics and bio-inspired structures for military applications.
CLOSING DATE: 18 June 2012 (Earliest starting date: July 1st 2012)
ONLINE APPLICATION:
https://jobs.soton.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?ref=121312BX
There will be a mini-symposium entitled "Defects and Microstructure at the Nanoscale and Beyond," at the USNCCM-10 conference in Columbus, OH, July 16 -19, 2009. This topic is of keen interest to the I-Mechanica community and we hope many of you will join us there. Our goal is to bring together researchers from the mechanics, materials, and physics communities to cross-fertilize research on defect-mediated processes in microstructural evolution, with a focus on both hard and soft materials.
