Macromodeling of thermally driven V-shaped MEMS actuators

In this paper, we propose a new mixed-level nonlinear electro-thermo-mechanical dynamic macromodel for a thermally driven V-shaped MEMS actuator. The proposed reduced-order macromodel is composed of a nonlinear circuit-level electro-thermal macromodel and a nonlinear system-level thermo-mechanical macromodel obtained by application of the Galerkin method. Both macromodels are then cascaded to describe the dynamic tip displacement of the V-shaped thermal MEMS actuator. The electro-thermo-mechanical macromodel shall be used for improving the transient response of the MEMS actuator. The system dynamic behavior is successfully reproduced by using the proposed macromodel. The results obtained by the macromodels are in good agreement with the finite element ANSYS simulations and are computationally by far less expensive. Furthermore, the experimental static tip displacements of the actuator for different actuation voltages are in very good agreement with steady-state values of the actuator's tip displacements obtained by the proposed macromodel and the maximum error obtained is less than 7%.