%0 Journal Article
%T Effects of van der Waals Force and Thermal Stresses on Pull-in Instability of Clamped Rectangular Microplates
%A Romesh C. Batra
%A Maurizio Porfiri
%A Davide Spinello
%J Sensors
%D 2008
%I MDPI AG
%X We study the influence of von Karman nonlinearity, van der Waals force, and a athermal stresses on pull-in instability and small vibrations of electrostatically actuated mi-croplates. We use the Galerkin method to develop a tractable reduced-order model for elec-trostatically actuated clamped rectangular microplates in the presence of van der Waals forcesand thermal stresses. More specifically, we reduce the governing two-dimensional nonlineartransient boundary-value problem to a single nonlinear ordinary differential equation. For thestatic problem, the pull-in voltage and the pull-in displacement are determined by solving apair of nonlinear algebraic equations. The fundamental vibration frequency corresponding toa deflected configuration of the microplate is determined by solving a linear algebraic equa-tion. The proposed reduced-order model allows for accurately estimating the combined effectsof van der Waals force and thermal stresses on the pull-in voltage and the pull-in deflectionprofile with an extremely limited computational effort.
%K Microelectromechanical systems
%K microplate
%K van der Waals force
%K pull-in insta- bility
%K microsensor
%U http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/8/2/1048/