Keynote Lecture
Modeling of Magnetorheological Elastomers: from materials to device
Thursday (24.09.2020) 11:35 - 12:05 Z: Special Symposia II Part of:In this talk, I will present our work on magnetorheological elastomers (MREs) focusing mostly on the theory and numerical modeling. MREs are composite materials comprising metallic soft (e.g. iron) or hard (e.g. NdFeB) magnetic micron-sized particles. The latter have been called h-MREs. Out of these materials one can devise a number of interesting meso- and macrostructures slender or not that can lead to a number of functionalities such as surface patterning, negative or positive swelling, network activation, negative Poisson ratio, evolving anisotropic magnetic properties, hierarchical buckling and others. Their modeling is highly demanding since they exhibit finite strains and, in many cases, strong magneto-mechanical coupling. This coupling is a result of the particle-particle interactions. Those interactions evolve during a large strain process and one needs to describe them sufficiently well to recover the actual response of the material. I will present a recent homogenization-guided model for soft MREs which is then implemented in the modeling of an entire magnetic device that serves to deform an MRE membrane. The difficulties in the numerical modeling of both material and device will be highlighted. The final results are versatile and can be used to any type of device of boundary value problem.
