Effect of temperature on electromechanical instability of dielectric elastomers

The electromechanical behavior of dielectric elastomer is strongly affected by the temperature. Very few models accounting for the effects of temperature exist in the literature. A recent experiment showed that the variation of dielectric constant of the most widely used dielectric elastomer (VHB 4910, 3M) according to temperature is relatively significant. In this paper, we develop a thermodynamic model to study the influence of temperature on the instability in dielectric elastomer by involving deformation and temperature-dependent dielectric constant. The results indicate that the increase of temperature could improve the actuation stress and the electromechanical instability of the elastomer.