A computational stochastic multiscale methodology for MEMS structures involving adhesive contact

This work aims at developing a computational stochastic multiscale methodology to quantify the uncertainties of the adhesive contact problems due to capillary effects and van der Waals forces in MEMS. Because the magnitudes of the adhesive forces strongly depend on the surface interaction distances, which in turn evolve with the roughness of the contacting surfaces, the involved structural behaviors suffer from a scatter. To numerically predict the probabilistic behaviors of structures involving adhesion, the proposed method introduces stochastic meso-scale random apparent contact forces which can be integrated into a stochastic finite element model. Because the evaluation of their realizations is expensive, a generator for the random apparent contact force using the polynomial chaos expansion is constructed in an efficient way.