Structural and Thermal Analysis of a Thermally Actuated Polymer Micro Robotic Gripper

Abstract

This paper describes the structural and thermal modeling of a thermally actuated polymer micro robotic gripper. The basic structure for the gripper is a trimorph thermal actuator with a platinum metal heater encapsulated by parylene C polymer layers. Due to the large difference of thermal expansion coefficients between different structural layers, the actuator can be actuated with much larger deflections than conventional MEMS actuators. In this paper, we presented a finite-element modeling of thermal transient response and the thermo-mechanical coupling behavior of the polymer MEMS gripper.