Dynamic snap-through instability and damped oscillation of a flat arch of hard magneto-active elastomers

In this paper, we investigated the dynamic responses of a hard magneto-active arch (HMAA) under three forms of external magnetic fields. An HMAA was fabricated by compressing a flat plate of hard magneto-active elastomers (HMAEs) to buckle. A theoretical model was formulated by using the Euler–Lagrange (E-L) equation and considering the damped oscillations. Our experiment and theory showed that the HMAA could achieve a dynamic snap-through instability at a magnitude of 63 Gs. The snapping process only took a few microseconds, and the HMAA had a speed of about 141 mm/s and a large displacement of about 10 mm. After the snap-through instability, the period of oscillation was about 60 ms. Especially, the HMAA subjected to a triangle magnetic field behaved as a bistable system. This paper is desired to help design robust devices of HMAEs by harnessing the rapid configuration change through the snap-through instability.