Computational Modeling for the Thermo-electro-mechanical Coupling in Electroactive Polymers

  • Kumar, Jaynandan (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology)
  • Dana, Bishara (SW at audio research; Magnit@Meta)
  • Jabareen, Mahmood (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology)

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Electroactive polymers (EAPs) are soft, incompressible, and viscoelastic materials widely used as shell-like structures exposed to temperature variations. Given the sensitivity of EAPs to thermal fluctuations, constitutive frameworks for thermo-electro-mechanical behavior have been established in the existing literature. However, the computational modeling of fully coupled thermo-electro-mechanical interactions remains underexplored, particularly concerning the elimination of locking phenomena inherent to shell-like structures. This study extends a recently developed solid-shell element, which utilizes a modified Green-Lagrange strain tensor and has demonstrated reliability in mechanical and electromechanical modeling, to characterize the thermo-electro-mechanical behavior of EAPs. The proposed formulation constructs the modified strain tensor using the Assumed Natural Inhomogeneous Strain (ANIS) and Enhanced Assumed Strain (EAS) methods. The model is implemented within the commercial finite element software ABAQUS, and numerical examples are presented to validate the approach.