Dual Approach for Electromechanical Coupling in MEMS

In this paper we present an approach for the computation of coupled electromechanical problems in micro-electromechanical systems based on a vector potential formulation of the electrostatic problem. This formulation is the dual of the scalar potential approach commonly used in the literature. We present an analytic derivation of the force computed using this dual method based on the virtual work principle, and compare the primal and dual approaches on the finite element solution of simple two-dimensional test-cases.Copyright © 2009 by ASME