## 4 Discussion and Conclusions
Alternatively, if the lateral direction is held constant while the axial direction is scaled down, i.e., the architecture is made \"lower\", the spacing between plates will decrease and the associated disproportionate benefit to output force density can be obtained. However, this would have undesirable effects on the channel's aspect ratio and the design's overall robustness in terms of manufacturability and mechanical strength. It is clear then that such tradeoffs will have to be informed by a combination of further FEA simulations and experimental work. The potato spiral design offers several important advantages compared to the weave and the serpentine. First, the potato spiral addresses the likely causes of internal fluidic short circuits during clearing by possessing a much larger channel width with no sharp turns. This lowers fluidic resistance, thus reducing the required clearing pressure and increasing success in clearing the channels. Critically, the potato spiral achieves this improvement while keeping the channel separation small, thus ensuring high output force density, as predicted by previous work [36; 58]. The potato spiral also allows for larger radii of curvature (in the axial direction) compared to the weave and the serpentine, thereby decreasing the likelihood of delamination between the longitudinally stacked layers. So, overall, the potato spiral should be much more resistant to that failure mode. Second, the potato spiral's entire arclength is dedicated to the capacitor \"plates\", with no real estate given to connections between plates. Thus, this architecture allows for increased utilization of the cross-sectional area towards force generation without sacrificing the cross-sectional area or arclength to wiring connections. Thus, the same output force density can then be achieved with larger separation of the electrodes. Hence, the material would be more robust to rupture, and thus less likely to produce a fluidic short and/or electric breach. This is critical when attempting to optimize the force density output, as suggested by previous simulations [36; 58]. Third, the potato spiral fiber would avoid generating the lateral contractive force that the serpentine fiber experiences due to the mutual winding. Thus, the potato spiral fiber could offer less resistance to lateral expansion and thus to longitudinal contraction. This allows for an additional advantage to be obtained from the nonlinearity of the electrostatic force with plate distance. The twisting motion of the potato spiral could be undesirable at various scales and/or in different applications. One way to reduce this effect if desired could be to arrange an array of potato spiral fibers with parallel primary axes and opposite chirality. Unfortunately, the cancellation of the twisting effect by this method can add to the experienced resistance to longitudinal contraction, because the neighboring fibers will act partly against each other's natural motions. This establishes another design tradeoff between limiting twisting and limiting the overall longitudinally assessed force density. Alternatively, the two fibers could be based on helices that possess matching chirality. This would reinforce the twisting on the outer boundary of the two fiber bundles. Another way to reduce the twisting effect expected from the potato spiral architecture is to decrease the angle of the helix, thus making the capacitor \"plates\" closer to orthogonal to the longitudinal axis. This would effectively redirect a fraction of the generated force acting towards torsional elongation to now act towards linear compression. This method does not have the same drawback associated with canceling the effect with arrays, since the force is not canceled out but instead repurposed. Twisting can also be decreased by laterally scaling down, as this type of scaling would reduce the moment arm that produces the torque. Again with this method, there is no cancellation of the forces, and thus, it avoids the associated tradeoff inherent to the array method discussed above.