Development and verification of 2D dynamic electromechanical coupling solver for micro-electrostatic-actuator applications

The construction, analysis, and simulation of a dynamic electromechanical coupling module, DEDS FEM, is presented in this paper. This module integrates an electrostatic distribution subroutine with commercial finite element packages to explore the influence of electrostatic load imposed on mechanical dynamics and it has been successfully verified by a lumped analytical model, a convergence test of a fixed-fixed beam example, and a RF MEMS switch case study. For 2D case, it shows that the DEDS FEM can achieve the same accuracy as that performed by differential quadratic method (DQM) and finite difference method (FDM) but with a significant improvement in the user friendliness and the capability in handling complicated geometries and material constitutive laws. In addition, by this approach, it allows users to handle problems with more complicated constitutive law of materials, boundary conditions, and loading manners and it should be useful in the conceptual design analysis and device longevity study for many electrostatic driven MEMS devices such as digital mirror displays (DMD), RF MEMS relays, and optical switches.