Summary
Soft materials with tiny fibers can change shape and conduct electricity differently depending on how the fibers are arranged, but simulating this in full 3D is very slow. The authors developed a way to model the fibers as beams inside a soft material, using math that captures both how they stretch and how electricity flows without needing extra calculations on the fibers themselves. Their method links the fibers and the material seamlessly and solves everything together, allowing study of how changing fiber layouts affects behavior without heavy 3D computing. This makes it easier to predict how these soft materials respond to electrical and mechanical forces.
What this means in practice
- •For materials scientists: Simulate and design soft composites with fiber networks to predict combined mechanical and electrical behavior efficiently.
- •For soft robotics engineers: Predict how embedded fiber architectures in soft actuators respond electromechanically to improve actuator design.
Authors
L. River Spencer, Manuel K. Rausch, Chad Landis, Jan N. Fuhg
Abstract
Soft electroactive composites can exhibit strongly architecture-dependent mechanical and electrical responses, but explicitly resolving dense fiber networks in three dimensions is computationally expensive. We develop a mixed-dimensional finite-element formulation in which electroactive fibers are represented by geometrically exact beams embedded in a deformable dielectric matrix. Unlike existing electroactive beam formulations in which the electric potential is defined directly on the beam, the embedded fibers here are driven by the three-dimensional electric field of the surrounding matrix. The matrix field is sampled along the beam centerlines and enters the beam dielectric enthalpy directly, providing two-way electromechanical coupling without introducing independent electric-potential degrees of freedom on the beams. Beam and matrix mechanics are coupled through projected mortar constraints, and the electromechanical problem is solved monolithically. We use the formulation as the microscale model in a periodic homogenization framework to compute effective stress and electric displacement. Verification studies quantify discretization and field-sampling sensitivity, followed by structured and irregular network examples that demonstrate architecture-dependent mechanical and electrical responses without body-fitted three-dimensional fiber meshes.