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I worked on a research project over microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) in the Aerodynamics group of Prof. Essers. This project was a collaboration between several research groups of the Université de Liège: Aerodynamics, Mechanical Vibrations (Prof. Golinval) and Applied and Computational Electromagnetics (W. Legros). My objective in this project was to simulate the deformation of microactuators taking into account the damping effect of air. These microactuators had to be manufactured by IMTEK and tested in the vibrations lab.

I designed the geometry of the actuators together with Véronique Rochus and Guillaume Sérandour from the Mechanichal Vibrations group. The shape and dimensions of the actuators were strongly limited by manufacturing constraints. Therefore, we started with a microplate as suggested by IMTEK specialists. An example of such plates is shown in Fig. 1; although this is not represented in the drawing, the extremities of the beams are clamped so as to maintain the structure a few microns above the base of the chip. A square electrode is fixed to the chip under the plate. The square holes are imposed by manufacturing constraints.

Figure 1. Geometry of the micro-actuator (length=300$\mu m$, width=100$\mu m$, thickness=2$\mu m$). The aluminium plate is 2$\mu m$ above the electrode.

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Figure 2. Electric scalar potential and electric force acting on the plate, calculated with my own code and visualized with Gmsh.

Figure 3. Vertical displacement of the plate : (left), electromechanical simulation (OOfelie+my code) for an excitation frequency equal to $0.5\,\nu_r$, $\nu_r$ and $2\,\nu_r$, where $\nu_r$ is the resonance frequency; (right), electromechanical simulation with/without fluid coupling (OOfelie+my code+Didier Vigneron's code) at the resonance frequency.