Soft Electromechanical Elastomers Impervious to Instability

Abstract Soft dielectric elastomers that can exhibit extremely large deformations under the action of an electric field enable applications such as soft robotics, biomedical devices, and energy harvesting among others. A key impediment in the use of dielectric elastomers is failure through instability mechanisms or dielectric breakdown. In this work, by using a group theory-based approach, we provide a closed-form solution to the bifurcation problem of a paradigmatical elastomer actuator and discover an interesting result: at a critical electric field, the elastomer becomes impervious to Treloar–Kearsley instability. This limit is reached prior to the typical dielectric breakdown threshold. Our results thus establish a regime of electrical and mechanical loads where the dielectric elastomer is invulnerable to all common failure modes.