סמינר מחלקתי Yuval Gerson
School of Mechanical Engineering Seminar
Wednesday, December 17, 2014 at 15:00
Wolfson Building of Mechanical Engineering, Room 206
Meso Scale MEMS Actuators and Sensors
Yuval Gerson
PhD Student of Prof. Slava krylov
Meso scale microelectromechanical (MEMS) structures, with features in the range between few hundreds of micrometers and up to several millimeters are beneficial for implementation in applications where relatively bulky masses, large displacements combined with manufacturability, ease of handling, packaging and integration are required. Micro accelerometers and gyroscopes, scanning mirrors or triggering devices can be mentioned just to name a few. Larger feature size of meso scale MEMS results in better relative accuracy and higher manufacturing yield of batch micro fabrication and enables achieving improved performance along with reducing the product costs. However, the scaling effect, which lies in the foundation of the existing design paradigms and actuation techniques common in MEMS becomes less pronounced at the meso scale. As a result, development of new designs and actuation solutions more suitable for meso scale MEMS are required.
In the framework of the research, we explored several approaches allowing efficient actuation and achievement of relatively large displacements in meso scale MEMS devices. In the talk we will present some of the devices that were developed such as multistable large displacement MEMS actuators and electrothermally tunable bistable structures, large displacement rotating wheels, electrostatic meso scale motion transformer and amplifier realized as a compliant mechanism, a nickel meso scale MEMS inertial switch fabricated by a novel electroplating based Metal on Insulator (MOI) technique and an angular rate sensor (micro gyro) with highly efficient parametric excitation. We present the design and fabrication aspects of the proposed solutions and discuss the challenges and possible research directions related to the implementation of the meso scale MEMS technology in future sensors and actuators.
