Restoring Force Surface Analysis of Nonlinear Vibration Data from Micro-cantilever Beams

* Corresponding author, Email: [email protected], alternate contact: H. Sumali, [email protected] . † Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under Contract DE-AC04-94AL85000. ABSTRACT The responses of micro-cantilever beams, with lengths ranging from 100-1500 microns, have been found to exhibit nonlinear dynamic characteristics at very low vibration amplitudes and in near vacuum. This work seeks to find a functional form for the nonlinear forces acting on the beams in order to aide in identifying their cause. In this paper, the restoring force surface method is used to non-parametrically identify the nonlinear forces acting on a 200 micron long beam. The beam response to sinusoidal excitation contains as many as 19 significant harmonics within the measurement bandwidth. The nonlinear forces on the beam are found to be oscillatory and to depend on the beam velocity. A piecewise linear curve is fit to the response in order to more easily compare the restoring forces obtained at various amplitudes. The analysis illustrates the utility of the restoring force surface method on a system with complex and highly nonlinear forces.