Electro-Thermo-Mechanical Beam Model

In this paper we present our compact electro-thermo-mechanical beam model. Compact models are important for efficiently modeling parametric performances of a large number of multicomponent systems. There are some finite element analysis tools like COMSOL, Intellisense and lumped models in Sugar, Coventoreware that can model and simulate thermodynamic phenomena's. But what is new about our compact model is that along with the features offered by the above models, ours can support energy exchange by radiation or between itself and neighboring components. Our compact model considers mechanical beams subject to various energy transfer mechanisms, properties, and boundary conditions. Energy transfer mechanisms can include: conduction, convection to ambient, radiation due to the radiation source, and interaction with the substrate. Thermal expansion is determined by computing the average temperature of the beam and by applying equivalent end node forces to elongate the beam. As a test case we model the deflection of a U-shaped thermal actuator subject to all the energies listed above. The results compare well with experiment.