Mechanical properties of microcantilevers: Influence of the anticlastic effect

Abstract Measurements of Young's modulus of microstructures are frequently based on dynamic tests on microbeams. The aim of this work is evaluating if the accuracy of these measurements is affected significantly by the anticlastic effect. A nonlinear model of cantilever's dynamic behavior is thus developed and applied to some characteristic cases. The obtained results show that, even if the introduced nonlinearity is small enough to allow a modal approach to be still applied, the anticlastic effect has a meaningful influence on measurement accuracies as it is evidenced by the dependence of the resonant frequency on vibration amplitudes. The proposed treatise permits determining the appropriate range of excitation amplitudes to be used during the experiments and consequently to reduce appreciably the intervals of uncertainty of the measurements.