A comprehensive analysis on the discretization method of the equation of motion in piezoelectrically actuated microbeams

Abstract

In many of microdevices a part of a microbeam is covered by a piezoelectric layer. Depend on the application a DC or AC voltage is applied between upper and lower side of the piezoelectric layer. A common method in many of previous works for evaluating the response of these structures is discretizing by Galerkin method. In these works often single mode shape of a uniform microbeam i.e. the microbeam without piezoelectric layer has been used as comparison function, and so the convergence of the solution has not been verified. In this paper the Galerkin method is used for discretization, and a comprehensive analysis on the convergence of solution of equation that is discretized using this comparison function is studied for both clamped-clamped and clamped-free microbeams. The static and dynamic solution resulted from Galerkin method is compared to the modal expansion solution. In addition the static solution is compared to an exact solution. It is denoted that the required numbers of uniform microbeam mode shapes for convergence of static solution due to DC voltage depends on the position and thickness of deposited piezoelectric layer. It is shown that when the clamped-clamped microbeam is coated symmetrically by piezoelectric layer, then the convergence for static solution may be obtained using only first mode. This result is valid for clamped –free case when it is covered by piezoelectric layer from left clamped side to the right. It is shown that when voltage is AC then the number of required uniform microbeam shape mode for convergence is much more than the number of required mode in modal expansion due to the dynamic effect of piezoelectric layer. This difference increases by increasing the piezoelectric thickness, the closeness of the excitation frequency to natural frequency and decreasing the damping coefficient. This condition is often indefeasible in microresonator system. It is concluded that discreitizing the equation of motion using one mode shape of uniform microbeam as comparison function in many of previous works causes considerable errors.