Stability of Symmetrical Comb-Drive Actuator

Abstract

This paper reports the study, design, and simulation of a symmetrical comb-drive actuator. The approach for definition of the potential energy of the system is proposed. The electrical parameters of the comb-drive actuator are defined in COMSOL Multiphysics® software. Depending on an actuation voltage and an initial design it can form system with one, two, and three stable states. We show that the equilibrium at x = 0 is more stable for the comb-drive actuator with positive overlap than for device with the gap of the same value. The proposed approach will be used for design of the symmetrical actuator, which forms the output of the recently proposed contactless four-terminal MEMS element for capacitive adiabatic logic based on silicon MEMS technology.