Behavioural Analysis Of Thermal Actuator Made Up Of Metals Like Titanium, Stainless Steel And Brass

Abstract

Out of the various MEMS actuators, thermal actuators are easy to realize and creates more force by consuming less power compared with other types of MEMS based actuators [2]-[4].Conventional thermal actuators are made up of poly silicon which requires the use of costlier equipment's for its fabrication and further it has to go through dark room processing which is time consuming. In our system the thermal actuator are made up of metals like titanium, stainless steel and brass which were fabricated using a programmable 5-W 355-nm laser system, which makes the fabrication process cheaper and less time consuming. Performance of the actuator in terms of displacement and measured force also showed a marginal improvement when it is made up of metal. In our work we designed a system that uses a U-beam thermal actuator otherwise called as pseudo bimorph made up of three different metals. We studied and determined the behavior of the metal thermal actuator with respect to their displacement and force generated, and also determined the best design profile of thermal actuator based on varying their design parameters and by performing simulation using ANSYS. The obtained simulation data was also been validated against the experimental data. Finally a comparative analysis was made between the three metal thermal actuators.