Resonant microsystems have found broad applicability in environmental and inertial sensing, signal filtering and timing applications. Despite this breadth in utility, a common constraint on these devices is throughput, or the total amount of information that they can process. In recent years, elastically-coupled arrays of microresonators have been used to increase the throughput in sensing contexts, but these arrays are often more complicated to design than their isolated counterparts, due to the potential for collective behaviors (such as vibration localization) to arise. An alternative solution to the throughput constraint is to use arrays of electromagnetically-transduced microresonators. These arrays can be designed such that the mechanical resonances are spaced far apart and the mechanical coupling between the microresonators is insignificant. Thus, when the entire array is actuated and sensed, a resonance in the electrical response can be directly correlated to a specific microresonator vibrating, as collective behaviors have been avoided. This work details the design, analysis and experimental characterization of an electromagnetically-transduced microresonator array in both low-and atmospheric-pressure environments, and demonstrates that the system could be used as a sensor in ambient conditions. While this device has direct application as a resonant-based sensor that requires only a single source and measurement system to track multiple resonances, with simple modification, this array could find uses in tunable oscillator and frequency multiplexing contexts.
This work investigates the dynamics of electromagnetically-actuated and sensed microresonators. These resonators consist of a silicon microcantilever and a current-carrying metallic wire loop. When placed in a permanent magnetic field, the devices vibrate due to Lorentz interactions. These vibrations, in turn, induce an electromotive force, which can be correlated to the dynamic response of the device. The nature of this transduction process results in an intrinsic coupling between the system’s input and output, which must be analytically and experimentally characterized to fully understand the dynamics of the devices of interest. This paper seeks to address this need through the modeling, analysis, and experimental characterization of the nonlinear response of electromagnetically-transduced microcantilevers in the presence of inductive and resistive coupling between the devices’ input and output ports. A complete understanding of this behavior should enable the application of electromagnetically-transduced microsystems in practical contexts ranging from resonant mass sensing to micromechanical signal processing.
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