A Novel Displacement-amplifying Compliant Mechanism Implemented on a Modified Capacitive Accelerometer

Abstract

The micro-accelerometers are devices used to measure acceleration. They are implemented in applications such as tilt-control in spacecraft, inertial navigation, oil exploration, etc. These applications require high operating frequency and displacement sensitivity. But getting both high parameter values at the same time is difficult, because there are physical relationships, for each one, where the mass is involved. When the mass is reduced, the operating frequency is high, but the displacement sensitivity decreases and vice versa. The implementation of Displacement-amplifying Compliant Mechanism (DaCM) supports to this dependence decreases. In this paper the displacement sensitivity and operation frequency of a Conventional Capacitive Accelerometer are shown (CCA). A Capacitive Accelerometer with Extended Beams (CAEB) is also presented, which improves displacement sensitivity compared with CCA, and finally the implementation of DACM´s in the aforementioned devices was also carried out. All analyzed cases were developed considering the in-plane mode. The Matlab code used to calculate displacement sensitivity and operating frequency relationship is given in Appendix A. Keyword:Accelerometer Displacement Frequency MEMS Sensitivity

Displacement mechanical amplifiers designed on poly-silicon

“…The purposes of this paper are: Improve the displacement sensitivity and operation frequency of the Conventional Capacitive Accelerometer (CCA) made in Poly-Silicon, using extended beams (CAEB) and, compare the simulated performance of the systems formed by each accelerometer and the corresponding DaCM, designed in Silicon [17] with similar systems designed with Poly-Silicon (Section 3.2.). Silicon properties properties are shown in Table 1.…”

“…In this paper, two systems conformed by an accelerometer and a DaCM, are designed in Poly-Silicon, in order to identify their performance and to compare them with the corresponding individual accelerometer response. Subsequently, their performance will be compared with those presented in [17], to validate our scaled models, using Poly-Silicon.…”

Modified U-shaped Microactuator with Compliant Mechanism Applied to a Microgripper

“…where α is the thermal expansion coefficient of the corresponding material and ∆T denotes the temperature change. Room temperature in this paper was considered as 26.85 • C. The operation frequency was obtained and adapted from [33] by the mathematical formula…”