Simple and highly efficient microvalve systems based on an ionic polymer-metal composite (IPMC) diaphragm actuator have been developed. The microvalve system that was fabricated in this work operates when open and close voltage is applied, due to the phenomena of lithium ion flux and the subsequent electro-osmotic drag of water to the cathode. IPMC was prepared by compositing with platinum nano...

In pursuit of the goal of producing complete electromechanical systems entirely via solid freeform fabrication, we are developing a library of mutually compatible, functional, freeform elements. Several essential elements – actuation, sensing, and control electronics still remain to be incorporated into this library. Conducting polymers (CP) are a class of materials which can be used to produce...

A soft ionic conductor can serve as an artificial nerve in an artificial muscle. A polyacrylamide hydrogel is synthesized containing a hygroscopic salt, lithium chloride. Two layers of the hydrogel are used as ionic conductors to sandwich a dielectric elastomer and fabricate a highly stretchable and transparent actuator. When the two layers of the hydrogels are subject to a voltage, the actuato...

Common quasi-static electrostatic micro actuators have significant limitations in deflection due to electrode separation and unstable drive regions. State-of-the-art electrostatic actuators achieve maximum deflections of approximately one third of the electrode separation. Large electrode separation and high driving voltages are normally required to achieve large actuator movements. Here we rep...

A single crystal silicon MEMS microactuator for high density hard disk drives is described in this paper. The microactuator is located between a slider and a suspension, and drives the slider on which a magnetic head is attached. The MEMS actuator is fabricated by improved LISA process. It has an electrically isolated 20:1 (40μm thick, 2μm width) high aspect ratio structure directly processed f...

Electrostatic, comb-drive actuators have been designed for applications requiring displacements of up to 150 μm in less than 1 msec. A nonlinear model of the actuator relates the resonant frequency and the maximum stable deflection to the actuator dimensions. A suite of experiments that were carried out on DRIE, single-crystal silicon, comb-drive actuators confirm the validity of the model. Fou...

This article presents a soft pneumatic bending actuator using a magnetically assisted bilayer composite composed of silicone polymer and ferromagnetic particles. Bilayer composites were fabricated by mixing ferromagnetic particles to a prepolymer state of silicone in a mold and asymmetrically distributed them by applying a strong non-uniform magnetic field to one side of the mold during the cur...

A novel MEMS-based electrostatic actuator design is proposed for recording head fly height control below 10 nm. Different from prior work on MEMS-based electrostatic microactuators designed for magnetic hard disk drives (HDD), the proposed microactuator is fabricated monolithically with a conventional head/slider design. The actuator is micromachined into the same side as the head element on a ...

This paper investigates manipulation tasks with arrays of microelectromechanical structures (MEMS). We develop a geometric model for the mechanics of microactuators and a theory of sensorless, parallel manipulation, and we describe e cient algorithms for their evaluation. The theory of limit surfaces o ers a purely geometric characterization of microscale contacts between actuator and moving ob...