Finite element modeling of a thermally actuated polymer micro robotic gripper

This paper describes the structural and thermal model 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 of the different layers, the actuator can be actuated with much large deflection. In this paper, we present a finite-element modeling of thermal and the thermo-mechanical behavior simulation of this kind gripper.