Title: Mechanics of soft active materials
Description: Soft active materials, mostly elastomers and polymeric gels, are being developed to mimic a salient feature of life: movement in response to stimuli. For example, when an electric voltage is applied across a layer of a dielectric elastomer, the layer reduces in thickness and expands in area, giving a strain greater than 100%. As another example, in response to a small change of pH or temperature, a hydrogel may absorb a large amount of water and increase its volume over 100 times. The mechanics involved in these processes is important, interesting, and not well understood. This thesis studies large deformations and instabilities in dielectric elastomers and polymeric gels. The thesis first presents a nonlinear field theory for deformable dielectrics. The theory uses measurable quantities to define field variables. The definitions lead to decoupled field equations, and electromechanical coupling enters the theory through material laws. We use the theory to study electromechanical instability and coexistent states in dielectric elastomers. A computational method is also developed to analyze inhomogeneous deformations in complicated structures of dielectric elastomers. The second part of the thesis discusses large deformation and mass transportation in polymeric gels. A gel can undergo large deformation of two modes: local rearrangement and long-range migration. We assume that the local rearrangement is instantaneous, and model the long-range migration by assuming that the solvent molecules diffuse inside the gel. We further study inhomogeneous and anisotropic deformations and instabilities in gels constrained by rigid materials.