Modeling the influence of the Casimir force on the pull-in instability of nanowire-fabricated nanotweezers

Abstract

The Casimir force can strongly interfere with the pull-in performance of ultra-small structures. The strength of the Casimir force is significantly affected by the geometries of interacting bodies. Previous investigators have exclusively studied the effect of the Casimir force on the electromechanical instability of nanostructures with planar geometries. However no work has yet considered this effect on the pull-in instability of systems with cylindrical geometries such as nanotweezers fabricated from nanotube/nanowires. In our present work, the influence of the Casimir attraction on the electrostatic response and pull-in instability of nanotweezers fabricated from cylindrical conductive nanowires/nanotubes is theoretically investigated. An asymptotic solution, based on scattering theory, is applied to consider the effect of vacuum fluctuations in the theoretical model. The Euler–Bernoulli beam model is employed, in conjunction with the size-dependent modified couple stress continuum theory, to derive the governing equation of the nanotweezers. The governing nonlinear equations are solved by two different approaches, i.e., the modified Adomian–Padé method (MAD–Padé) and a numerical solution. Various aspects of the problem, i.e., the variation of pull-in parameters, effect of geometry, coupling between the Casimir force and size dependency effects and comparison with the van der Waals force regime are discussed.