Design and fabrication of an electrothermal microactuator for multi-level conveying

Abstract

During the past years, a variety of microactuators developed for micro-conveyors have been presented. However, such micro-conveyors can only provide conveying motion in a single plane. Here an electrothermally driven microactuator with a capability of adjustable height is proposed, which may act as a basic unit for multi-level conveyors. This microactuator is based on the principle of thermal bimorph actuation with two long conveying fingers to exert out-of-plane bending motions in the transversal direction, which are connected and lifted by an initially curved height adjuster in the longitudinal direction. The devices can provide conveyance of micro-objects between two plane levels of different heights. The testing results show that the two fingers and a height adjuster can be actuated simultaneously and individually with little thermal crosstalk. The proposed device with a dimension of 900·100·4.5 lm 3 can provide 5 lm vertical displacements by the height adjuster at 1 V and 18 lm lateral displacements by the conveying finger at 2 V. Simulations by finite-element program ANSYS 5.7 have been performed and widely match with testing results.

Effect of Peak Tracking Methods on FBG Calibration Derived by Factorial Design of Experiment

“…where m is the mass of the calibrated weights, g is the gravity acceleration (9.81 m/s 2 ), E silica (72 GPa, [33]) and E PI (2.5 GPa, [34]) are the Young's modulus of the silica and polyimide, respectively, and finally, A silica and A PI are the cross-sections of the fiber with an outer diameter of 125 µm and the polyimide with a thickness around 25 µm, respectively. Then E PI A PI E silica A silica , so that the values of ε are computed for the silica only.…”

Characterization of a micromachined parylene-based thermal C-shape actuator

“…Chu et al present a mechanical model for a thermal bimorph with many similarities to that derived here, but use the results of Doring et al to check their results, and do not include a thermal or dynamic model [13,27]. Suh et al [10], Lin et al [8], and Wu and Hsu [11] all present mechanical models used to predict deflection but do not include thermal or dynamic models. Chan et al [2] presented a comprehensive mechanical and thermal model with some similarities to that presented here, but did not have experimental results to compare to their model predictions.…”

Planar micromanipulation on microconveyor platforms: recent developments

“…Another implementation of a cilia platform is introduced in Wu and Hsu (2006). In this publication, an electrothermally Group of actuators and one motion pixel cell of the cilia platform Figure 2.1 driven microactuator with adjustable height is proposed.…”