Things don't always go as planned. It's practically a universal constant, and our efforts to build a working dielectric elastomer actuator (DEA) didn't progress as planned.

Still, we felt that the research we had done and the parts we procured in building prototypes of this actuator shouldn't go to waste. Thus, in addition to the principles and fabrication of our prototype DEA, we detail a failure assessment: What went wrong, how we analyzed the prototype, and the further obstacles we foresaw that resulted in our decision to abandon this actuator.