research

(to appear in International Journal of Fracture; Proceedings of the 5th Intl. Symposium on Defect andMaterial Mechanics)

Amit Acharya and Claude Fressengeas

Dielectric elastomer (DE) is a kind of electroactive polymer material,
capable of large deformation up to 380%. However, under conservative
operating conditions, DE is susceptible to instability with a small
deformation due to various modes of failure, including electrical
breakdown, electromechanical instability (EMI), loss of tension and
rupture by stretch. This paper proposes a free energy model in the
thermodynamic system of DE involving thermoelastic strain energy,
electric energy and purely thermal contribution energy to obtain the
stability conditions of all failure modes. The numerical results
indicate that the increase in temperature can markedly contribute to
improving the entropy production, the actuation stress and the critical

(to appear in Quarterly of Applied Mathematics)

by Marshall Slemrod and Amit Acharya

Given an autonomous system of Ordinary Diff erential Equations without an a priori split into slow and fast components, we defi ne a strategy for producing a large class of `slow' variables (constants of fast motion) in a precise sense. The equation of evolution of any such slow variable is deduced. The strategy is to rewrite our system on an in finite dimensional "history" Hilbert space X and defi ne our coarse observation as a functional on X.

Nano Lett. DOI: 10.1021/nl202088h

This paper uses the thermodynamic data of aqueous solutions of uncrosslinked poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) to study the phase transition of PNIPAM hydrogels.  At a low temperature, uncrosslinked PNIPAM  can be dissolved in water and form a homogenous liquid  solution.  When the temperature is increased, the solution separates into two liquid phases with different concentrations of the polymer.   Covalently crosslinked PNIPAM, however, does not dissolve in water, but can imbibe water and form a hydrogel.  When the temperature is changed

Adv. Funct. Mater.  DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201101224

*Participation to this club is as easy as i) sending a reference/abstract of your paper if you are working in this area or ii) send a challenge concept/issue/expt if you are not experimentalist :)*