Micro Actuators

This paper describes the design and fabrication of planar micro-coil on printed-circuit board (PCB)for magnetic MEMS actuator. A simple and cost effective technique for the fabrication of planar micro-coil is presented. The design and analysis process have been carried out by using COMSOL Multiphysics 4.2. Three different coil dimensions such as width/space= 150μm/100μm; 100μm/100μm and 50μm/100μm, have been analyzed in order to find the optimum coil geometry. The results showed that the coil with dimension of width/space of 50μm/100μm produced the highest magnetic flux density of max 0.0068 T. The optimized design of the planar micro-coil can be used as a reference for the future fabrication of magnetic MEMS actuator.

A study of synthesization and magnetic properties
of cured polymer composite on nickel (Ni) as an actuator
membrane is prepared in this work. SU8 3050 polymer is used to
mix with magnetic nanoparticles Ni to produce a hybrid material.
The mixing process are done by using mechanical stirrer,
ultrasonication and manually hand stirring. In this work an easy
sol-gel method is selected to embed magnetic particles into the
polymer matrix. Characterization of particle distribution is
observed by metallurgical microscopy and scanning electron
microscope (SEM). It is observed that the spreading of Ni
particles inside the polymer chain are constant without clustering
effects. Magnetization curves of each sample are traced at room
temperature using vibration sample magnetometer (VSM). A
good compromising magnetic properties with patternable high
aspect ratio structures have been successfully fabricated using a
standard MEMS process.

The main purpose of this work was to spear head research and development in Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) especially in the development small flapping wing systems which can greatly be used for defense as well as surveillance purposes. This project focused on the development of a flapping wing mechanism with a wing span of just 3 cm using a piezoelectric bimorph actuator.