Thermo-pneumatic Micro Actuator with Bi-stable Membrane

좌굴과 상변화를 이용한 micro actuator 의 개발 및 해석

A brand-new micro actuator is introduced in this paper. This device is one of thermo-pneumatic actuators, and based on two distinct principles of snap-through buckling and phase change. These coupled phenomena affect each other positively and will outrun the performance of an ordinary thermo-pneumatic actuator. Our efforts are focused on comprehensive analysis on the driving force of the actuator. For the analysis, we explain each principle and offer approximated models for the buckling and phase change. The calculation results from each model are compared to experimental data. The comparison between prediction from models and data from experiments is within the satisfaction in spite of a lot of approximations.