title: Effects of van der Waals Force and Thermal Stresses on Pull-in Instability of Clamped Rectangular Microplates.
abstract: We study the influence of von Karman nonlinearity, van der Waals force, and a athermal stresses on pull-in instability and small vibrations of electrostatically actuated mi-croplates. We use the Galerkin method to develop a tractable reduced-order model for elec-trostatically actuated clamped rectangular microplates in the presence of van der Waals forcesand thermal stresses. More specifically, we reduce the governing two-dimensional nonlineartransient boundary-value problem to a single nonlinear ordinary differential equation. For thestatic problem, the pull-in voltage and the pull-in displacement are determined by solving apair of nonlinear algebraic equations. The fundamental vibration frequency corresponding toa deflected configuration of the microplate is determined by solving a linear algebraic equa-tion. The proposed reduced-order model allows for accurately estimating the combined effectsof van der Waals force and thermal stresses on the pull-in voltage and the pull-in deflectionprofile with an extremely limited computational effort.
authors.affiliation: Department of Engineering Science & Mechanics, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA. rbatra@vt.edu.
authors.forename: Romesh C
authors.initials: RC
authors.lastname: Batra
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY 11201, USA. mporfiri@poly.edu.
authors.forename: Maurizio
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Porfiri
authors.affiliation: The Bradley Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA. dspinell@vt.edu.
authors.forename: Davide
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Spinello
keywords: Microelectromechanical systems; microplate; microsensor; pull-in insta- bility; van der Waals force