Wrinkles in soft dielectric plates

Abstract: We show that a smooth giant voltage actuation of soft dielectric plates is not easily obtained in practice. In principle one can exploit, through pre-deformation, the snap-through behavior of their loading curve to deliver a large stretch prior to electric breakdown. However, we demonstrate here that even in this favorable scenario, the soft dielectric is likely to first encounter the plate wrinkling phenomenon, as modeled by the onset of small-amplitude sinusoidal perturbations on its faces. We provide an explicit treatment of this incremental boundary value problem. We also derive closed-form expressions for the two limit cases of very thin membranes (with vanishing thickness) and of thick plates (with thickness comparable to or greater than the wavelength of the perturbation). We treat explicitly examples of ideal dielectric free energy functions (where the mechanical part is of the neo-Hookean, Mooney-Rivlin or Gent form) and of dielectrics exhibiting polarization saturation. Finally we make the link with the classical results of the Hessian electro-mechanical instability criterion and of Euler buckling for an elastic column.