Piezoelectric bimorph elements are versatile and inexpensive electromechanical transducers which may be used to construct fast mechanical stimulators and finely controlled micromanipulators. The mechanical stimulators described provide continuously graded displacements ranging from nanometers to about a millimeter, or forces equivalent to 0-7 g. Appropriately designed units can produce small st...

Magnetic force microscopy (MFM) using electrostatic force modulation has been designed and developed to avoid the drawbacks of the bimorph driven system. The bimorph driven system has poor frequency response and overlap of the topographic features on magnetic structures of the MFM images. In the electrostatic force modulation system, the amplitude increases in the noncontact regime as the tip a...

This paper proposes a new non‐magnetic motor with a rotor rotated by using the resonance en‐ ergy of a bimorph cantilever beam excited by electrostatic force. The use of flexible material en‐ ables conversion of translational vibration to rotary movement in one direction. Basic character‐ istics of a prototype motor with two bimorph cantilever beams, such as rotational speed, output torque, and...

We have modeled and analyzed the performance of two types of piston-like out-of-plane motion micromechanical structures: a conventional microstructure, which has a single bimorph region, and a flip-overbimaterial (FOB) microstructure, which has two bimorph regions respectively located on the top and bottom sides of the structure. For both structures, simple analytical expressions of their end-p...

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...

Piezoelectric diaphragms are used as synthetic jets because of their size, rapid time response, and relatively low power consumption. Among the piezoelectric diaphragms used are unimorphs and Bimorphs. In this study, a bimorph diaphragm, a thin Unimorph pre-stressed device and a Radial Field Diaphragm (RFD) are compared. A bimorph consists of two bonded PZT discs, a thin Unimorph pre-stressed d...

Piezoelectric bimorph actuation has been successfully used in numerous types of microdevices, most notably micropumps. However, even for the simple case of circular geometry, analytical treatments are severely limited. This study utilized the finite-element method to optimize the deflection of a circular bimorph consisting of a single piezoelectric actuator, bonding material and elastic plate o...

In this paper we present a new slot antenna with an embedded temperature sensor for remote sensing in harsh environment applications. When the antenna is illuminated with a plane wave it returns a signal. The returned signal’s frequency is modulated by the loaded capacitance formed by an array of MEMS bimorph (metal-dielectric) cantilevers. The MEMS cantilevers deflect downwards when the temper...