Smooth boundary topology optimisation applied to an electrostatic actuator

Smooth Boundary Based Optimisation Using Fixed Grid

1. Abstract This paper presents a boundary based structural optimisation in the finite element fixed grid environment. The boundary is represented by smooth B-spline curves, as they typically require a relatively small number of control points to describe a curve. Utilising B-spline control points reduces the number of design variables whilst achieving a smooth boundary representation. An appro...

Robust Control of an Electrostatic Microelectromechanical Actuator

A continuing trend these days is the use of micro-electro-mechanical actuators with electronic circuitry to fabricate MEMS devices such as micro-switches, hard disks, optical micro-mirrors ... One of the problems with the electrostatic MEMS actuator is that when an electrical voltage is applied to these devices, the micro-actuators undergo a residual vibration before reaching their permanent po...

Hardware implementation of an electrostatic MEMS-actuator linearization

In this paper, an electrostatic actuator linearization will be introduced, which is based on an existing hardware-efficient iterative square root algorithm. The algorithm is solely based on add and shift operations while just needing n/2 iterations for an n bit wide input signal. As a practical example, the nonlinear input transformation will be utilized for the design of the primary mode contr...

Experimental Validation for an Extended-stability Electrostatic Actuator

A voltage regulator is developed to extend the operation range of a electrostatic actuator using a displacement feedback. The feedback actuator system can be used for continuous position tracking of step, ramp, or harmonic voltage signals. The electrostatic actuator is composed of a micro-cantilever beam electrode above a fixed electrode. The voltage difference between the two electrodes is reg...

Introduction to Applied Algebraic Topology