Coupled effects of surface interaction and damping on electromechanical stability of functionally graded nanotubes reinforced torsional micromirror actuator

Abstract

This paper demonstrated the coupled surface effects of thermal Casimir force and squeeze film damping (SFD) on size-dependent electromechanical stability and bifurcation of torsion micromirror actuator. The governing equations of micromirror system are derived, and the pull-in voltage and critical tilting angle are obtained. Also, the twisting deformation of torsion nanobeam can be tuned by functionally graded carbon nanotubes reinforced composites (FG-CNTRC). A finite element analysis (FEA) model is established on the COMSOL Multiphysics platform, and the simulation of the effect of thermal Casimir force on pull-in instability is utilized to verify the present analytical model. The results indicate that the numerical results well agree with the theoretical results in this work and experimental data in the literature. Further, the influences of volume fraction and geometrical distribution of CNTs, thermal Casimir force, nonlocal parameter, and squeeze film damping on electrically actuated instability and free-standing behavior are detailedly discussed. Besides, the evolution of equilibrium states of micromirror system is investigated, and bifurcation diagrams and phase portraits including the periodic, homoclinic, and heteroclinic orbits are described as well. The results demonstrated that the amplitude of the tilting angle for FGX-CNTRC type micromirror attenuates slower than for FGO-CNTRC type, and the increment of CNTs volume ratio slows down the attenuation due to the stiffening effect. When considering squeeze film damping, the stable center point evolves into one focus point with homoclinic orbits, and the dynamic system maintains two unstable saddle points with the heteroclinic orbits due to the effect of thermal Casimir force.