Abstract
Many types of electrostatic microactuators have been reported. However, these actuators generally generate small force and low power. We proposed the novel driving principle of the microactuator that makes electrostatic energy/force collaborate with the elastic energy/force, and the actuator driven by the principle was named Energy Conversion-type Micro Actuator powered by Collaboration of Electrostatic and Elastic energies/forces, and EC-Macbee for short. This driving principle can be realized by using non-linear spring and the non-linearity makes the microactuator highly effective. Therefore, the design of the non-linear spring is very important. A few type of the non-linear spring was designed by using the FEM analysis. Mechanical performance of the micro actuator was also evaluated. Initial generated force of microactuator with one type of non-linear spring is about 1000 times higher than that with linear spring. The effort to fabricate novel microactuators having non-linear spring is carried out for confirming the novel driving principle and evaluating the performance of them.
