Phenomenological modeling of viscous electrostrictive polymers

A common usage for electroactive polymers (EAPs) is in different types of actuators, where advantage is taken of the deformation of the polymer due to an electric field. It turns out that time-dependent effects are present in these applications. One of these effects is the viscoelastic behavior of the polymer material. In view of the modeling and simulation of applications for EAP within a continuum mechanics setting, a phenomenological framework for an electro-viscoelastic material model is elaborated in this work. The different specific models are fitted to experimental data available in the literature. While the experimental data used for inherent electrostriction is restricted to small strains, a large strain setting is used for the model in order to account for possible applications where the polymers undergo large deformations, such as in pre-strained actuators. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.