A numerical study of squeeze-film damping in MEMS-based structures including rarefaction effects

In a variety of MEMS applications, the thin film of fluid responsible of squeeze-film damping results to be rarefied and, thus, not suitable to be modeled though the classical Navier-Stokes equation. The simplest way to consider fluid rarefaction is the introduction of a slight modification into its ordinary formulation, by substituting the standard fluid viscosity with an effective viscosity term. In the present paper, some squeeze-film damping problems of both parallel and torsion plates at decreasing pressure are studied by numerical solving a full 3D Navier-Stokes equation, where the effective viscosity is computed according to proper expressions already included in the literature. Furthermore, the same expressions for the effective viscosity are implemented within known analytical models, still derived from the Navier-Stokes equation. In all the considered cases, the numerical results are shown to be very promising, providing comparable or even better agreement with the experimental data than the corresponding analytical results, even at low air pressure. Thus, unlike what is usually agreed in the literature, the effective viscosity approach can be efficiently applied at low pressure regimes, especially when this is combined with a finite element analysis (FEA).