Determining pull-in curves with electromechanical FEM models

This paper presents a short overview of the different approaches to compute the pull-in curve for discretized models of electrostatically actuated microsystems that are currently available in the literature. The focus is on the so-called 'staggered' algorithms. A new method to improve thes...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEuroSimE 2008 - International Conference on Thermal, Mechanical and Multi-Physics Simulation and Experiments in Microelectronics and Micro-Systems pp. 1 - 8
Main Authors Hannot, S.D.A., Rixen, D.I.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.04.2008
Subjects
Electric potential
Electrodes
Electrostatics
Magnetic heads
Mechanical sensors
Micromechanical devices
Numerical models
Sensor systems
Testing
Voltage
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Summary:This paper presents a short overview of the different approaches to compute the pull-in curve for discretized models of electrostatically actuated microsystems that are currently available in the literature. The focus is on the so-called 'staggered' algorithms. A new method to improve these existing approaches by using charge loading is proposed. The performance of the algorithms is tested with some numerical experiments: FEM models of microbeams, used to model microswitches. The results show that the charge loading scheme provides a fast converging alternative for the traditional path-following approaches.
ISBN:1424421276
9781424421275
DOI:10.1109/ESIME.2008.4525057