Arrays of electrostatic MEMS actuators have been fabricated using a modi ed, multi-layer SCREAM (SingleCrystal Reactive Etching and Metallization) process. The devices consist of released, torsionally suspended grids with high aspect ratio single-crystal silicon (SCS) tips. They can be used to generate a force eld for the manipulation of small, at objects. Calculations and experiments show that...

This paper presents the design and fabrication of a novel piezoelectric actuator for a gas micro pump with check valve having the advantages of miniature size, light weight and low power consumption. The micro pump is designed to have eight major components, namely a stainless steel upper cover layer, a piezoelectric actuator, a stainless steel diaphragm, a PDMS chamber layer, two stainless ste...

The influence of piezoelectric actuator design on a two-port piezoelectrically transduced micro-electro-mechanical (MEMS) ring resonator frequency tuning performance has been investigated. A cubic silicon carbide (3C-SiC) ring resonator was fabricated with a lead–zirconium–titanate (PZT) piezoelectric actuator and sensor integrated on the surface of the ring. Measurements of the transmission fr...

Flexoelectricity allows a dielectric material to polarize in response to a mechanical bending moment and, conversely, to bend in response to an electric field. Compared with piezoelectricity, flexoelectricity is a weak effect of little practical significance in bulk materials. However, the roles can be reversed at the nanoscale. Here, we demonstrate that flexoelectricity is a viable route to le...

ABSTRACT The important practical and realistic design issues of an electrostatic actuator/positioner with full-gap travel are discussed. Analytic expressions and numerical simulations show that parasitic capacitances, and non-uniform deformation in two and three dimensions influence the range of travel of an electrostatic positioner stabilized by the addition of a series capacitor. The effects ...

A polypyrrole (PPy) composite film with a pure PPy zone and a PPy–TiO2 nanoparticle composite zone in its cross-sectional direction was synthesized by direct oxidation of pyrrole successively in an electrolyte with or without TiO2 nanoparticles. The volume content of TiO2 in the composite film was tested to be lower than 0.9%. The actuator fabricated from this monolithic PPy film bends uniforml...

Compact electrostatic micromirror structures for use in the scanning arm of an optical coherence tomography (OCT) system are described. These devices consist of millimeter-scale mirrors resting upon micrometer-scale polyimide hinges that are tilted by a linear micromachine actuator, the integrated force array (IFA). The IFA is a network of deformable capacitor cells that electrostatically contr...

We present a new fabrication method to produce arrays of highly responsive polymer-metal core-shell magnetic microactuators. The core-shell fabrication method decouples the elastic and magnetic structural components such that the actuator response can be optimized by adjusting the core-shell geometry. Our microstructures are 10 μm long, 550 nm in diameter, and electrochemically fabricated in pa...

This paper presents a fabrication process that integrates polysilicon surface micromachining and deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) bulk silicon micromachining. The process takes advantage of the design flexibility of polysilicon surface micromachining and the deep silicon structures possible with DRIE. As a demonstration, a torsional actuator driven by a combdrive moving in the out-of-plane dire...