A Low Voltage Controller for a Chaotic Micro Resonator

The performance of a chaotic micro resonator is improved by redesigning a quadratic controller reported in a previous study. The chaotic micro resonator is composed of an electrostatic actuator and a voltage regulator (controller). The actuator is made of cantilever beam electrode above a fixed electrode. The actuator voltage, and consequently the electrostatic force magnitude, is controlled to drive the cantilever beam oscillations into chaos by creating a bi-stable regime in the system response. The performance of the redesigned controller is improved such that the system input voltage is reduced. The voltage generated by the controller is halved and the controller gains are smaller, which reduces the power and gain demands on the analogue controller components. The static and dynamic responses of the chaotic oscillator are studied and the sizes of the basins of attraction are compared for the improved and the original quadratic controllers. The controller can be configured to create two potential wells. The excitation DC voltages can then be adjusted to control the size of the upper and lower wells and thereby the basins of attraction around the two stable equilibria. As a result, one can shape the chaotic attractor to meet desired criteria. The reported chaos is intermittent chaos located in the lower well and between the two potential wells. This study can be used to design a new generation of nonlinear oscillators targeting high resolution sensors. ∗Address all correspondence to this author.