After the release of the SoftRobotics.Inverse, the toolbox for design optimization, we are proud to announce the release by Pasquale Ferrentino and his colleagues at VUB (Belgium) and the Defrost Inria team (France) of the ViscoElasticity plugin.

Many research fields are involved in developing and using new elastomeric materials and rubbers, such as soft robotics and surgical applications. So far, physical visco-elastic constitutive models were missing in SOFA. This is now solved by Pasquale et al. Visco-elastic models are dependent on the stress/strain rate. At low stress/strain rates, a viscoelastic material behaves like a viscous liquid-like material, while at high stress/strain rates, the same material behaves like a Hookean solid. In fact, the simplest viscoelastic models are the Maxwell and the Kelvin-Voigt models. These models are composed of an elastic part described by the spring symbol and a viscous one.

To describe their visco-elastic properties, different visco-elastic models have to be used, like the Standard Linear Solid (SLS) Maxwell/Kelvin-Voigt representation. This plugin makes available 9 different viscoelastic models. It is also now available on our updated plugin page.