Hybrid Design of a Polymeric Electrothermal Actuator for Microgripper

Abstract

Thermal micro actuators are widely used for large displacement, high accuracy and repeatability. The applications of these devices are in the fields of micro assembly, micro surgery and manipulation of micro particles. In this paper, the development of electro thermal micro actuator based on PMMA (Poly Meta Methyl Acrylate) is described. The paper presents the development of a new micro actuator for a microgripper which has a combination of asymmetric arm and bi-layer structure to completely eliminate the undesirable out of plane movement. Three models of electro thermally actuated polymeric micro actuators using low voltage of 0.1 V are designed and analyzed using COMSOL Multiphysics software. The results are discussed and compared to show the efficiency of the hybrid design. The hybrid design gives 2.5 µm of in plane gripping displacement and 0.02 µm out of plane displacement at 0.1 V.

Modeling of the Effect of Metal Islands in Hybrid Contacts to MoS2

“…For the "electric currents" physics, the conductivity of the material must be user-defined; the conductivity for Au was chosen to be 45.6 × 10 ! S/m [11]. Abraham and Mohney [12] report sheet resistances from 24-32 kΩ/□ for devices made on eight-layer MoS 2 .…”