Micromachines, Volume 13, Issue 9
September 2022 - 189 articles
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Cover Story: Microgrippers are promising tools for the micro-manipulation and characterization of cells. In this paper, a biocompatible electro-thermally actuated microgripper with rotary capacitive position sensor is presented. To overcome the limited displacement possibilities usually provided by electrothermal actuators, conjugate surface flexure hinges (CSFH) are adopted. A kinematics modeling approach based on the pseudo-rigid-body method (PRBM) is applied to describe the microgripper’s working mechanism, and analytical modeling, based on the finite elements method (FEM), is used to optimize the electrothermal actuator design and the heat dissipation mechanism. Finally, FEM-based simulations are carried out to verify the microgripper, the electrothermal actuator and heat dissipation mechanism performance, and to assess the validity of the analytical modeling. View this paper