Stress-optimised shape memory microactuator

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Abstract
A shape memory membrane actuator has been developed, which consists of stress-optimized microfabricated NiTi beam-cantilever devices of 100 micrometers thickness. For stress- optimization, the lateral widths of the beams have been designed for homogeneous stress distributions without local stress maxima, allowing a maximum use of active material for bending actuation. As a result, higher work outputs for a given stress level and smaller hystereses are obtained compared to non-optimized actuators with parallel beam-cantilever devices. Thus, improved hysteresis control is possible and better lifetime characteristics are expected. For a strain limit of 2% the achieved work output is about 24 (mu) Nm.

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