Mechanical Performance of a Cascaded V-Shaped Electrothermal Actuator

Abstract

The function and performance of MEMS are affected by the output ability of the displacement and force of microactuators. The lateral deflection of cascaded V-shaped electrothermal actuators is modelled as a triple, statically indeterminate problem. An iteration algorithm is set up to calculate the output displacement and typical forces in anchors. The calculated results of this model agree well with our own simulation results as well as with the experimental and calculated results in the literature, and we conclude that the model is credible. The paper also discusses the effects of the structure parameters and temperature increments on the displacement production ability. Clear differences were found between single and cascaded V-shaped electrothermal actuators. For the former, the maximum deflection takes place in a 0.04 rad beam angle, while for the latter the beam angle is 0.19 rad. For both types of actuators, the deflection is unrelated to the beam thickness. The displacement of the cascaded V-shaped electrothermal actuator is proportional to the temperature increment and beam length, but is inversely proportional to the beam width. Experiments on the output ability of cascaded V-shaped electrothermal actuators validated the calculated and simulation results.

Design, modeling, and characterization of a MEMS electrothermal microgripper

“…This movement is a physical field of electro-thermal-structure coupling process (Huang and Lee 1999;Hickey et al 2002;Johnstone and Parameswaran 2004). Recently, work has been reported on the development of accurate models to describe the behavior of microstructure (Leang 2010;Shen and Chen 2013). In general, the solution for temperature distribution is obtained by considering the balance between Joule heating and the three primary modes of heat transfer.…”

Review of Electrothermal Actuators and Applications

“…The schematic is shown in Figure 7a. The actuation current is applied either across the primary stages only [86] or across all beams [87]. In the latter case, the primary and secondary beams bear different current densities, thus, the difference in thermal effects needs to be considered carefully.…”

Iterative Learning Control for V-Shaped Electrothermal Microactuator

“…Since then, they have been studied, analyzed, and widely applied in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology. Major improvements and applications can be mentioned as micro-gripper [2], linear micro-motors [3,4], rotary micro-motors [5,6], etc. To facilitate the analysis and calculation, the authors have built models and simulated by using the finite element method [6][7][8].…”

“…It is exhibited extraordinary here in the obtained results, especially in Figure 8a (without external disturbances) and Figure 9a (with an additional output disturbance), which illustrate the dependence of maximal tracking error on applied learning step number, that the tracking error does not decrease monotonously if the learning number is increased, as proven in [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] by using a mathematical model of VEM. A reason for it could be that an uncertain difference between the mathematical models given in [5,8,9] and the here used Simscape model of VEM has appeared. It can be deduced that these mathematical models may not be precise enough for using it to design a conventional open-loop controller for VEM.…”