Elastic instabilities of a ferroelastomer beam for soft reconfigurable electronics
Abstract(#br)We examine the flexural deformation and snap-through instability of a pre-buckled ferroelastomer beam. The beam is composed of ferromagnetic and electrically conductive microparticles suspended in a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) matrix. Bending and snap-through are controlled remotely with an external magnetic field. The observed magneto-flexural coupling is in reasonable agreement with predictions from an analytic model based on elastic rod theory and variational techniques.