Micro-fabricated polymeric thermal actuators array for rectifying the deformation of MEMS substrate

To improve the performance of MEMS device, it is critical that the effect of environmental parameters on these devices be controlled or eliminated. In this paper, we first developed a novel technique by employing thermal actuator and actuators array to rectify the micro deformation of MEMS substrate due to thermal mechanical stress as a result of temperature variation. This PTAA consisting of a 50 μm thick silicon membrane which is supported by an actuators array. The polymeric thermal actuator array (PTAA) was fabricated utilizes SU-8-2100 (Microchem Crop., USA) as the main functional material and thin Titanium/Aluminum(Ti/Al) electrode layer as the microheater. The numerical analysis of the PTAA was implemented with ANSYS based on an thermal-mechanical coupled simulation. According to the analysis results, the actuators tend to have relatively high stiffness and large displacement in actuation direction, reaching 3 μm in simulation. The PTAA were able to achieve accurate rectifying of the substrates´ deformation. We mainly present the design, simulation and operation principle of this novel PTAA.