Nowadays the use of surface tension in microsystems is being considered with interest in a lot of applications. This is based on the fact that surface tension forces linearly decreases with the size while the weight decreases more quickly. While surface tension has been pointed out as being one of the disturbing effects in MEMS (stiction problems [kondo05, mastrangelo93, wu06]), other uses have been positively considered [berge93, hendriks05, leeOO, oh06]. More particularly, surface tension effects have been applied to many fields such as capillary gripping [bark99, grutzeck99, obata04, biganzoli05, Iambert06, schmid06], fluidic microvalves [feng03], actuation [borno06], optics [bergeOO]. More particularly in the field of micro-assembly, the combination of positional assembly - where objects are mechanically manipulated and positioned one by one - and self-assembly - where objects arrange themselves into ordered structures by physical or chemical interactions- still remains an industrial challenge. If successful this technique could be a new and flexible production concept permitting the development of a fully innovating hybrid automated tool for assembly of micro-products [hy-dromel06]. This tutorial intends to give some key concepts towards capillary forces modelling and its possible application to the fields of microrobotics and microassembly. The elements presented in this seminar are based on own developments summarized in [Iambert07, zhou09]. These references can serve as a support for further reading on this topic.
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