Reducing stiffening and curling in micro-plates via corrugations

Bahi Bakeer, Adel Elsabbagh and Mohammed Hedaya

Abstract

Micro-beams and micro-plates suffer from residual stress problems such as stiffening and curling. This affects the performance of these micro-structures in MEMS applications. It is found from previous literature that minimizing both stiffening and curling is a challenging issue. This paper proposes double corrugations in both longitudinal and transverse directions as a remedy to this problem. A Finite Element model is developed and validated with results in literature. A parametric study is implemented to study the effect of number of corrugations and corrugation height on the micro-plate performance as compared to a flat one with the same stiffness. Proposed corrugations result in reducing stiffening, and curling, by 90%, and 87%, respectively. The corrugations concept may be used to improve the performance of many MEMS applications such as pressure sensors, resonators, and RF switches. In the case of RF switches for instance, the proposed method achieved a reduction of 39% in switching time.

Key Words

biaxial stress; corrugation; curling; MEMS; micro-plate; stiffening; stress gradient

Address

Bahi Bakeer: Design and Production Engineering Department, Ain Shams University, 1 Elsarayat St., Abbaseya, 11517 Cairo, Egypt, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Galala University, Galala City, Egypt Adel Elsabbagh: Design and Production Engineering Department, Ain Shams University, 1 Elsarayat St., Abbaseya, 11517 Cairo, Egypt Mohammed Hedaya: Design and Production Engineering Department, Ain Shams University, 1 Elsarayat St., Abbaseya, 11517 Cairo, Egypt

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