Electrostatic Forces and Stored Energy for Deformable Dielectric Materials An isothermal energy balance is formulated for a system consisting of deformable dielec- tric bodies, electrodes, and the surrounding space. The formulation in this paper is Robert M. McMeeking obtained in the electrostatic limit but with the possibility of arbitrarily large deformations Fellow ASME of polarizable material. The energy balance recognizes that charges may be driven onto Department of Mechanical and Environmental or off of the electrodes, a process accompanied by external electrical work; mechanical Engineering and Materials Department, loads may be applied to the bodies, thereby doing work through displacements; energy is University of California, stored in the material by such features as elasticity of the lattice, piezoelectricity, and Santa Barbara, CA 93106 dielectric and electrostatic interactions; and nonlinear reversible material behavior such e-mail:
[email protected] as electrostriction may occur. Thus the external work is balanced by (1) internal energy consisting of stress doing work on strain increments, (2) the energy associated with Chad M. Landis permeating free space with an electric field, and (3) by the electric field doing work on Mem. ASME increments of electric displacement or, equivalently, polarization. For a conservative Department of Mechanical Engineering and system, the internal work is stored reversibly in the body and in the underlying and Materials Science, surrounding space. The resulting work statement for a conservative system is considered Rice University, in the special cases of isotropic deformable dielectrics and piezoelectric materials. We Houston, TX 77251 identify the electrostatic stress, which provides measurable information quantifying the e-mail:
[email protected] electrostatic effects within the system, and find that it is intimately tied to the constitutive formulation for the material and the associated stored energy and cannot be independent of them.