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Stress in Thin Film for Self-Curving

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Hello, I just want to say I am new at COMSOL so this might be trivial, but thank you for any help you can provide!

I am trying to simulate using swelling (or stress or strain, whatever works) to create curving in a thin-film of a polymer (SU8). I created a simple thin rectangle and made the hydroscopic swelling coefficient proportional to z. I put one point in the middle of the bottom face and made that the point constraint for the structure.

In theory, the film should fold into a cylinder like in this research paper in Figure 3a, because of the stress gradient in the z direction: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1531 . However, it only gets to the point in the image attached here (with the deformation scaled by 10), before getting a non-convergience error. It does not complete the curve into a cylinder. Would it be possible to model the whole curving using COMSOL, and if so, do you have any advice for how I can model this correctly? My COMSOL file is also attached here.

Thank you so much!



0 Replies Last Post Oct 27, 2020, 11:06 p.m. EDT
COMSOL Moderator

Hello Carol Mikhael

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