A Stochastic Multi-Scale Model for Predicting MEMS Stiction Failure

Abstract

Adhesion is an important phenomenon in the context of MEMS for which the surface forces become dominant in comparison with the body forces. Because the magnitudes of the adhesive forces strongly depend on the surface interaction distances, which in turn evolve with the roughness of the contacting surfaces, the adhesive forces cannot be determined in a deterministic way. To quantify the uncertainties on the structural stiction behavior of a MEMS, this work proposes a “stochastic multi-scale methodology”. The key ingredient of the method is the evaluation of the random meso-scale apparent contact forces, which homogenize the effect of the nano-scale roughness and are integrated into a numerical model of the studied structure as a random contact law. To obtain the probabilistic behavior at the structural MEMS scale, a direct method needs to evaluate explicitly the meso-scale apparent contact forces in a concurrent way with the stochastic multi-scale approach. To reduce the computational cost, a stochastic model is constructed to generate the random meso-scale apparent contact forces. To this end, the apparent contact forces are parameterized by a vector of parameters before applying a polynomial chaos expansion in order to construct a mathematical model representing the probability of the random parameters vector. The problem of micro-beam stiction is then studied in a probabilistic way.