Computational electro-elasticity and magneto-elasticity for quasi-incompressible media immersed in free space

In this work, a mixed variational formulation to simulate quasi-incompressible electro-active or magneto-active polymers immersed in the surrounding free space is presented. A novel domain decomposition is used to disconnect the primary coupled problem and the arbitrary free-space mesh update problem. Exploiting this decomposition, we describe a block-iterative approach to solving the linearised multiphysics problem, and a physically and geometrically based, three-parameter method to update the free space mesh. Several application-driven example problems are implemented to demonstrate the robustness of the mixed formulation for both electro-elastic and magneto-elastic problems involving both finite deformations and quasi-incompressible media. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.