Analysis of the Air Damping in MEMS Lateral Driven Microresonators

Air damping has significant effect on the performance of MEMS structures. A numerical method has been brought out by authors to calculate the effect of air damping force in the lateral oscillating microresonator with a revised Reynolds Equation, but it is too complex for MEMS design. In the present paper, a new simple analysis of the air damping is proposed, which considers slip effect and gas rarefaction effect. A simulation of the microresonator is performed by FEM (finite element method) software, ANSYS, includes model establishment, modal analysis and amplitude-frequency analysis which depend on "spring-mass-dashpot" dynamic model. Considering air damping, the analysis results with this method show that have good agreement with the experimental data.

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