The present study deals with the rheological behavior modeling of a dielectric elastomeric (DE) material class. The DE materials are commonly used to develop soft actuators and energy harvesters in soft robotics. DE is a class of electroactive polymers that produces large strains with an electrically induced load application. In this article, a micro mechanics-based thermodynamically consistent rheological model is derived to capture the electro–viscoelastic behavior of the DE material class. A multiplicative deformation gradient decomposition into elastic and viscous parts is incorporated to attain a transitional configuration. The decomposition is being used for setting up the constitutive evolution equations for an electro–viscoelastic deformation. The derived rheological model agrees well with existing experimental results. We succeed here to enable the effect of viscosity and electric field on the deformation simultaneously with a micro mechanics-based analytical finding with the least possible material parameters.

本研究涉及介电弹性体 (DE) 材料类别的流变行为建模。DE 材料通常用于开发软机器人中的软执行器和能量收集器。DE 是一类电活性聚合物，在施加电感应负载时会产生大应变。在本文中，导出了一个基于微观力学的热力学一致流变模型，以捕捉 DE 材料类别的电粘弹性行为。乘法将变形梯度分解为弹性和粘性部分，以获得过渡配置。该分解用于建立电粘弹性变形的本构演化方程。导出的流变模型与现有的实验结果非常吻合。我们在这里成功地实现了粘度和电场对变形的影响，同时以尽可能少的材料参数进行了基于微观力学的分析发现。