Mechanical Behavior of an Electrostatically Actuated Microplate

We present a nonlinear model of electrically actuated microplates. The model accounts for the nonlinearity in the electric forcing as well as mid-plane stretching of the plate. We use a Galerkin approximation to reduce the partial-differential equations of motion to a finite-dimension system of nonlinearly coupled second-order ordinary-differential equations. We find the deflection of the microplate under DC voltage and study the pull-in phenomenon. The natural frequencies and mode shapes are then obtained around the deflected position of the microplate by solving the linear eigenvalue problem. The effect of various design parameters on both the static response and the dynamic characteristics are studied.Copyright © 2003 by ASME