A shape memory membrane actuator has been developed, which consists of stress-optimized microfabricated NiTi beam-cantilever devices of 100 micrometers thickness. For stress- optimization, the lateral widths of the beams have been designed for homogeneous stress distributions without local stress maxima, allowing a maximum use of active material for bending actuation. As a result, higher work outputs for a given stress level and smaller hystereses are obtained compared to non-optimized actuators with parallel beam-cantilever devices. Thus, improved hysteresis control is possible and better lifetime characteristics are expected. For a strain limit of 2% the achieved work output is about 24 (mu) Nm.

Date Published: 26 April 1996
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 2779, 3rd International Conference on Intelligent Materials and 3rd European Conference on Smart Structures and Materials, (26 April 1996); doi: 10.1117/12.237168

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 2779:
3rd International Conference on Intelligent Materials and 3rd European Conference on Smart Structures and Materials
Pierre Francois Gobin; Jacques Tatibouet, Editor(s)