Fatigue fracture of a highly stretchable acrylic elastomer

Dielectric elastomer has been extensively explored in various applications as soft active material. In most applications, dielectric elastomer is subjected to cyclic loading-unloading condition. As a result, a small initial defect in a dielectric elastomer may finally grow to a critical size to induce catastrophic rupture. In this article, we carried out an experimental study of the crack growth in an acrylic dielectric elastomer under cyclic loading-unloading. Pure-shear test specimens were used to measure the relationship between crack growth rate and energy release rate. Such relationship can be simply fit to a power-law. We further used the measured power-law to successfully predict the fatigue lifetime of the acrylic elastomer with an edge crack and subject to simple extension cyclic loading-unloading test.