A macroscopic constitutive relation for isotropic-genesis, polydomain liquid crystal elastomers

Abstract

Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are rubber-like solids that incorporate nematic mesogens (stiff rod-like molecules) as a part of their polymer chains. In recent years, isotropic-genesis, polydomain liquid crystal elastomers (I-PLCEs) has been a topic of both scientific and technological interest due to their intriguing properties such as soft behavior, ability to dissipate energy and stimuli response, as well as the ease with which they can be synthesized. We present a macroscopic or engineering scale constitutive model of the behavior of I-PLCEs. The model implicitly accounts for the complex evolution of the domain patterns and is able to faithfully capture the experimentally observed complex response to multi-axial loading. We describe a multiscale framework that motivates the model, explore various aspects of the model, validate it against experiments, and finally verify and demonstrate a numerical implementation.