We present a MEMS microphone that converts the mechanical motion of a diaphragm, generated by acoustic waves, to an electrical output voltage by capacitive fingers. The sensitivity of a microphone is one of the most important properties of its design. The sensitivity is proportional to the applied bias voltage. However, it is limited by the pull-in voltage, which causes the parallel plates to c...

Biological adhesive contacts are usually of hierarchical structures, such as the clustering of hundreds of sub-micrometre spatulae on keratinous hairs of gecko feet, or the clustering of molecular bonds into focal contacts in cell adhesion. When separating these interfaces, releasable adhesion can be accomplished by asymmetric alignment of the lowest scale discrete bonds (such as the inclined s...

Abstract The size dependent static pull-in instability of functionally graded (FG) microbeams in micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) is studied, considering the influence axial force. material properties are varied beam thickness by a power-law function, and they calculated rule mixture. To account for microsize effect, classical Euler-Bernoulli theory employed combination with modified coup...

in this study, dynamic buckling of embedded laminated nanocomposite plates is investigated. the plates are reinforced with single-walled carbon nanotubes (swcnts) where to obtain the equivalent material properties of them, mori-tanaka model is applied. based on the sinusoidal shear deformation theory (ssdt), the motion equations are derived using energy method and hamilton's principal. the...

The pull-in instability places substantial restrictions on the performance of electrostatically driven MEMS devices by limiting their range of travel. Our objective is to present a systematic method of carrying out optimal design of novel types of electrostatic beams that have enhanced travel ranges. In this paper, we implement a shape optimization methodology using simulated annealing to maxim...