Performance Comparison of Typical Electrothermal Actuators

As the power producer, the micro actuator is an important part of the micro electro- mechanical system, which is used as the conversion of energy, motion and force producing. In this paper, the mechanical models of three bent beam electrothermal actuators are summarized to make comparison with each other and analyze mechanical performance. For Π-shaped actuators, the tip displacements are proportional to temperature increment and length, having no relationship with the beam width and thickness. However, the displacement of Π-shaped actuators is smaller than the one of V-shaped actuators with the same parameters. For V-shaped actuators, the tip displacements of cascaded V-shaped actuators are larger than the ones of single V-shaped actuators with the same parameters. Especially, cascaded V-shaped actuator with secondary beam having no current has the largest displacement.