Electromechanical contact elements for modelling adhesion and interfacial interactions in electrospun nanofibers systems

Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.prostr.2020.11.041

The analysis of deformation and interactions during the electromechanical contact between surfaces with non-matching meshes is important for advanced applications such as mechanical energy harvesting and pressure/force sensors using flexible piezoelectric devices made of polymeric nanowires. The node-to-segment (NTs) and the node-to-surface (NTS) algorithms are widely employed discretization techniques despite well known limitations in problems where the identification of the master segment/surface related to a slave-node is ambiguous or impossible. The objectives of this work is to extend the classical formulation to electromechanical interfaces using automatic differentiation technologies to derive and implement the resulting numerical equations. In particular, the contact contributions to the stiffness matrix and to the residual vector are derived and an adhesion behaviour is also added into the constitutive law. Then, some applications to selected practical problems are presented.