The design of RF MEMS switches involves several disciplines: mechanics, materials science and electrical engineering. While significant progress has been made in the RF design of the switches, mechanical and material studies are required for mass commercialization of reliable devices. Senturia and co-workers at MIT have presented a closed form solution to describe the electromechanical behavior...

The differential electrostatic space accelerometer is an equivalence principle (EP) experiment instrument proposed to operate onboard China's space station in the 2020s. It is designed to compare the spin-spin interaction between two rotating extended bodies and the Earth to a precision of 10(-12), which is five orders of magnitude better than terrestrial experiment results to date. To achieve ...

In the field of resonant NEMS design, it is a common misconception that large-amplitude motion, and thus large signal-to-noise ratio, can only be achieved at the risk of oscillator instability. In the present paper, we show that very simple closed-loop control schemes can be used to achieve stable largeamplitude motion of a resonant structure, even when jump resonance (caused by electrostatic s...

Miniaturization of the steam engine to the microscale is hampered by severe technical challenges. Microscale mechanical motion is typically actuated with other mechanisms ranging from electrostatic interaction, thermal expansion, and piezoelectricity to more exotic types including shape memory, electrochemical reaction, and thermal responsivity of polymers. These mechanisms typically offer eith...

Miniature, lightweight, low-cost actuators that consume low-power can be used to develop unmatched robotic devices to make an impact on many technology areas. Electroactive polymers (EAP) actuators offer the potential to produce such devices and they induce relatively large bending and longitudinal actuation strains. This reported study is concentrating on the development of effective EAPs and ...

This paper describes the application of a novel band-pass sliding mode control (SMC) to the driving mode of MEMS-based resonators and resonant sensors (e.g. vibrating gyroscopes). The proposed technique relies on binary electrostatic actuation of the movable mass, dependent on the dynamics of the sliding/switching surface, in such a way that the generated actuation tracks possible changes in th...

We describe the molecular dynamics (MD)-aided engineering design of mutant peptides based on the alpha-helical coiled-coil GCN4 leucine zipper peptide (GCN4-p1) in order to obtain environmentally-responsive nanotweezers. The actuation mechanism of the nanotweezers depends on the modification of electrostatic charges on the residues along the length of the coiled coil. Modulating the solution pH...

This paper presents power delivery and actuation mechanisms designed for use in autonomous mobile robots whose dimensions can be measured in tens to hundreds of micrometers. Test devices utilizing these mechanisms have been fabricated at scale using micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology, and have been shown capable of untethered locomotion at speeds exceeding 1.5 mm/sec (scale-compa...

Stiction is a major failure mode in microelectromechanical systems MEMS . Undesirable stiction, which results from contact between surfaces, threatens the reliability of MEMS severely as it breaks the actuation function of MEMS switches, for example. Although it may be possible to avoid stiction by increasing restoring forces using high spring constants, it follows that the actuation voltage ha...