A study on dynamic analysis of the electrostatic actuator

A numerical simulation method is developed to analyze dynamic response of electrostatic actuator, which is electro-mechanical coupled system. The developed method is applied to find a dynamic response of a cantilever-type switch model, which is a basic component of electro-mechanical coupled system driven by electrostatic force. First, point charges model on conductor is proposed as a lumped parameter model of electrical part. Then, this model is easily incorporated into a multi-body dynamics analysis algorithm, the generalized recursive dynamics formula previously developed by our research group. The resulting motion of equation of a coupled overall system is formulated as a differential algebraic equation form including electrical and mechanical variables together and is simultaneously solved in every time step. To implement this approach into the useful dynamics analysis tool, we used multi-body dynamics software (RecurDyn) based on the generalized recursive formula using relative coordinate. The developed numerical simulation tool is evaluated by applying to many different driving condition and switch configuration. The final analysis model will be added to RecurDyn as a basic module for dynamics analysis of electro-mechanical coupled system.