AN APPROACH TO SMART STRUCTURE DESIGN USING MEMS TECHNOLOGY

摘要

Historically, conventional ultra-precision tool-machining historically made significant contributions to microsystems technology (MST), but the speed of progress was relatively slow until IC-technologies were introduced to the fabrication process of mechanics. Also, MEMS technology, which basically makes use of the tools of microelectronics, gave rise to a growing motivation for MST. According to remarkable progresses briefly summarized in this contribution, MEMS technology has recently exhibited the potential to integrate silicon-based mechanical structures, CMOS circuits as well as fluidic and photonic devices with very small dimensions on a common substrate. It is thus clear that MST and MEMS will have a profound influence in many areas dealing, in particular, with mechanical engineering. Remarkable progresses that have been achieved from early 1990's in microsystem technology (MST), will certainly result in a growing involvement of mechanical engineers in the field of MEMS-based active control of micro and macro-scale structures. So far, electrical engineers devoted themselves in MEMS processes and materials, but the involvement of mechanical engineers becomes obviously essential for inventing new actuation mechanisms and improving design tools towards MEMS-based smart structures. It will be important, and even decisive for the success of MST, that in design of mechanical structures, the means offered by the MEMS technology will be adequately applied. Miniaturization of systems using linear reduction of macroscopic scale structures would not adequately take into account both scaling effects and potentials of the MEMS technology. Additionally, it would not be reasonable to use MEMS technology to produce conventional components on a reduced scale, because taking advantage of batchwise manufacture only, would not be wholly satisfactory. Mechanical engineers will thus have to learn MST and MEMS before investigating completely new design strategies that will optimize the advantages offered by MEMS technology. MEMS-based active control of macro-scale structures using bottom-up design strategies will be clearly of particular interest (e.g. mainly because humans are living on the macroscopic scale), and will probably decide whether or not MST and MEMS can gain ground on the market over conventional technologies. The proposed approach to smart structure design using MEMS technology is dedicated to various readers. To students and those who are not familiar with MEMS, it is expected to help them to better understand the meanings of miniaturization and integrated systems. To experts in mechanical engineering, it finally provides an insight on how both MEMS-based structures and fabrication processes should be simultaneously designed to successfully integrate functional blocks into MEMS-based responsive systems for active control of micro and macro-scale structures.