An Efficient Design Procedure for MEMS Electrothermal Microgripper

Abstract

With the development of miniaturization technology, MEMS electrothermal microgrippers have been widely used owing to their compact size, ease of manufacturing, and low production cost. Since most of these systems are governed by partial differential equations (PDEs), modeling of microgrippers poses a significant challenge for designers. To reduce the overall computational complexity, it is a common practice to model the microgripper system using the finite element method (FEM). During the design process, the geometric and analytical properties of the microgripper influence the system dynamics to a great extent, and this work focuses on studying the effects of such parameter changes. In low voltage applications, the performance of the microgripper is influenced by the geometrical variations, and the air gap. Hence, for the modeling of the microgripper, actuator arm lengths, and the gap between the arms are chosen as the two main geometric design parameters, while the input current density is considered as the analytical design parameter. In this work, the optimized design parameter values for maximum possible displacement are obtained with the use of Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA). Further, an averaging operation is proposed for efficiently designing the MEMS electrothermal microgripper, and the efficacy of the proposed design methodology is demonstrated through simulation studies.