Investigation into Mode Localization of Electrostatically Coupled Shallow Microbeams for Potential Sensing Applications

Abstract

With the constant need for the development of smart devices, Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) based smart sensors have been developed to detect hazard materials, micro-particles or even toxic substances. Identifying small particles using such micro-engineering technology requires designing sensors with high sensitivity, selectivity and ease of integration with other electronic components. Nevertheless, the available detection mechanism designs are still juvenile and need more innovative ideas to be even more competitive. Therefore, this work aims to introduce a novel, smart and innovative micro-sensor design consisting of two weakly electrostatically coupled microbeams (both serving as sensors) and electrically excited using a stationary electrode assuming a dc/ac electric signal. The sensor design can be tuned from straight to eventually initially curved microbeams. Such an arrangement would develop certain nonlinear phenomena, such as the snap-through motion. This behavior would portray certain mode veering/mode crossing and ultimately mode localization and it would certainly lead in increasing the sensitivity of the mode-localized based sensing mechanism. These can be achieved by tracking the change in the resonance frequencies of the two microbeams as the coupling control parameter is varied. To this extent, a nonlinear model of the design is presented, and then a reduced-order model considering all geometric and electrical nonlinearities is established. A Long-Time Integration (LTI) method is utilized to solve the static and dynamics of the coupled resonators under primary lower-order and higher-order resonances, respectively. It is shown that the system can display veering and mode coupling in the vicinity of the primary resonances of both beams. Such detected modal interactions lead to an increase in the sensitivity of the sensor design. In addition, the use of two different beam’s configurations in one device uncovered a possibility of using this design in detecting two potential substances at the same time using the two interacting resonant peaks.

Static and Eigenvalue Analysis of Electrostatically Coupled and Tunable Shallow Micro-Arches for Sensing-Based Applications

“…Following the procedure developed by [ 39 , 40 , 41 ] and Newton’s second law associated with the Euler Bernoulli’s beam theory, we wrote the equations of the motion describing the transverse deflections in the absence of the electrostatic fringing filed of the lower micro-resonator as follows: where the two beams are assumed to be uniform and isotropic. The initial shape of the lower-beam was laid out to follow the expression while the upper-beam was laid out to follow the expression and the associated boundary conditions at the two supports are …”

“…Following the procedure developed by [39][40][41] and Newton's second law associated with the Euler Bernoulli's beam theory, we wrote the equations of the motion describing the transverse deflections in the absence of the electrostatic fringing filed of the lower micro-resonator as follows:…”

Gas Sensor Based on Nonlinear Coupled AlN-Piezoelectric Micromachined Resonators

“…These external stimuli could be mass [8], temperature [9], strain [10], acceleration [11] and other parameters based on different applications and designs. Aiming on enhancing the sensitivity of the resonant sensors, adopting linear and nonlinear dynamical phenomena is demonstrated to be a potential solution, including mainly mode localization [12], structure's nonlinearity features (i.e., especially fold bifurcations) [13], and multimode excitation [9].…”