Analytical study of MEMS/NEMS Force Sensor for Microbotics Applications

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is design, virtual fabrication and simulation of microcantilever based Force sensor using Comsol Multiphysics Software version 5.3a to perform analytical analysis of MEMS/NEMS based sensor for microbotic applications.Piezoresistive MEMS Force sensor having dimension of fixed part is 1000 µm2 with height of 50µm and movable part is 600 µm length, 500µm breadth and 20 µm height.The analysis of force sensor is observed by plotting a curve between force and voltage, Displacement and Voltage and Sensitivity. The range of force measured by this sensor is from 10N to 1µN, the simulating result shows that a very wide range of force can be measured by this single sensor. The force measurement at microscale has been very common in microbotics for micromanipulation . The simulated MEMS force sensor having resolution 0.1µN using piezoresistive sensing which is improved then the previous work. This range of force, resolution and sensitivity can be used for the application of two –fingered microgripper in microbotic system.Mathematically, dynamic frequency range for microcatilever based force sensor is calculated in range of 1.477076 KHz to 467.935969KHz, along with its different frequency harmonics for force 10N-100µN.Here, microcatilever is used for the measurement of force by using piezoresistors which are arranged in voltage divider sensing technique to obtain higher resolution, sensitivity and wide and lower range of force.