In this paper we present the modeling and simulation of a 2 degree-of-freedom (DOF) bidirectional electrothermal
actuator. The four arm microactuator was designed to move in both the horizontal and vertical axes. By tailoring the
geometrical parameters of the design, the in-plane and out-of-plane motions were decoupled, resulting in enhanced
mobility in both directions. The motion of the actuator was modeled analytically using an electro-thermo-mechanical
analysis. To validate the analytical model, finite element simulations were performed using ANSYS. The microactuators
were fabricated using PolyMUMPS process and experimental results show good agreement with both the analytical
model and the simulations. We demonstrated that the 2-DOF bidirectional electrothermal actuator can achieve 3.7 μm
in-plane and 13.3 μm out-of-plane deflections with an input voltage of 10 V.
In this paper we present an efficient method to calculate the thermal conductance in a thermally isolated microplate,
connected to the substrate by two thin arms. The method can be applied to uncooled microbolometer pixels which in
general, incorporate a thermally isolated microplate. The model approximates the microplate as a two-region slab, where
heat flows in one direction. The thermal resistance that results from the constriction of the heat flux lines is added to the
model as thermal contact resistance. To evaluate the model, two microplates having different dimensions were fabricated
using PolyMUMPs. The experimental results are compared to the proposed model and finite element simulations. It is
shown that for the tested structures, the maximum discrepancy in thermal conductance between our model and the
experiments is 6%, compared to the ~22% discrepancy found using conventional models. It is concluded that the method
is very effective in thermal modeling of microplates and it is applicable to uncooled microbolometer pixels.
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