Magnetorheological Elastomers

MREs are soft composite materials made of an elastomer matrix filled with micron-sized magnetizable iron particles. They belong to the class of active materials since they can deform not only under mechanical loading but also when they are submitted to a magnetic field. My focus in this area is to develop experimental methods to characterize the coupled magneto-mechanical behavior of these soft active materials so as to provide relevant data for the validation of constitutive models developed in LMS by Nick Triantafyllidis and Kostas Danas [9, 14]. In parallel, we also study interesting instability phenomena arising in MREs due to their microstructure or in structures made of MREs that are specially designed to create 2.5D surface patterns [13, 19, 21]. Recently, we started 3D printing heterogeneous MRE layers to obtain fully 3D magneto-activated surface patterns [23].