Comparative Study of Different Materials on Performance of Chevron Shaped Bent-Beam Thermal Actuator

In this paper, a bent beam thermal microactuator's performance is presented. Displacement of this thermal actuator has been compared for different materials. The proposed bent beam microactuator operates on the code of Joule's heating effect with the able guidance of thermal expansion which brings into play the advantage of the profile (chevron) to augment the cumulative effect of thermal expansion so that it can produce large in-plane displacement with minimum operating voltage. This revision is done by considering the basic benefit in the design of a bent beam microactuator system and thereby simulating this bent beam thermal microactuator using COMSOL Multiphysics5.1 to analyze the response. The behavior of this thermal bent beam microactuator is premeditatedly decided for different materials such as aluminum, gold, argentum, cuprum and nickel and observations are recorded for the displacement response for an applied electric potential 0.2 V between two anchors.