Fracture Behavior of Dielectric Elastomer under Pure Shear Loading

Dielectric elastomer has become a very important material for many emerging applications areas like optics, micro fluidics, sensors, actuators and energy harvesting. However, these elastomer components are prone to fracture or catastrophic failure because of defects likes notches, flaws, and fatigue crack, impurities which occur during production or during service. To make better use of this material, it is important to investigate fracture characteristics under different operating conditions. This study experimentally investigated the effects of notch length and strain rate on the fracture toughness, failure stretch and failure stress of acrylic elastomer under pure shear deformation mode. It is observed that failure stretch depends on notch length and independent of strain rate, but failure stress decreases with increasing notch length and increases with increasing strain rate. It is also found that fracture toughness is independent of notch lengths. However, fracture toughness is found to increase with strain rate. (paper)