The motivation of this study is to demonstrate the ability to excite the combination resonances near the first and third mode of vibration of clamped-clamped microbeams fabricated using surface micromachining techniques. The ability to control the resonator bandwidth and the amplitude of vibration is demonstrated experimentally, by controlling the amplitude and frequency of the electrical excitation force. This ability to excite multiple peaks and to control the resonator's bandwidth has promising applications in mass sensing and energy harvesting applications. Another objective is to explore the dynamics of out-of-plane structures made of Polyimide, which is bio-compatible material. The surface of these microbeams can be functionalized with polymers and other sorbent materials to allow mass/gas detection. The information about the use of such material is scarce and is not available for the science community. The final objective of this work is to study in details, the frequency response of these devices at the higher-order modes up to the nonlinear regime. Our study has shown interesting jumps and hardening effects at the higher-order modes.
We present experimental investigation of the nonlinear dynamics of a clamped-clamped in-plane MEMS shallow arch when excited by an electrostatic force. We explore the dynamic behaviors of the in-plane motion of the shallow arches via frequency sweeps in the neighborhood of the first resonance frequency. The shallow arch response is video microscopy recorded and analyzed by means of digital imaging. The experimental data show local softening behavior for small DC and AC loads. For high voltages, the experimental investigation reveals interesting dynamics, where the arch exhibits a dynamic snap-through behavior. These attractive experimental results verify the previously reported complex behavior of in-plane MEMS arches and show promising results to implement these structures for variety of sensing and actuation applications.
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