Technical Papers and Presentations

Large deflection actuators are becoming increasingly important for microsystems. Since actuation forces are usually small, large deflection actuators usually require flexures with low stiffness. Rectangular serpentine flexures are often used for such actuators due to their low stiffness and large linear deflection range. In this paper we investigate the performance of curved serpentine flexures to the performance of rectangular serpentine flexures. We test geometric process variations, linearity range, stress, strength, quality factor, electrical conductivity, and thermal conductivity in COMSOL simulation with the expectation of excellent performance of CSF.