New mems based micro gripper using sma for micro level object manipulation and assembling

Abstract

Micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS) based micro gripper for micro-assembling processes is designed. Gripper arms are actuated using a combination of Ni-Ti shape memory alloys and Si springs allowing a gripping range of 1- 120μm. Heat which is needed to actuate shape memory alloy (SMA) is obtained by electro thermal properties of Ni-Ti by passing a current which is controlled by specially designed microprocessor controlled circuit design. Stability of the gripper design is validated using a commercially available finite element analysis (FEA) tool COMSOL Multiphysics simulations for stresses in gripper arms and for Eigen frequencies. Proposed fabrication process uses minimum number of masks and it makes the design much suits for batch production.