Low-voltage closed loop MEMS actuators

An efficient electrostatic resonator is designed by adding a low voltage controller to an electrostatic actuator. The closed loop actuator shows stable, and bi-sable behaviors with bounded chaotic oscillations as large as 117% of the capacitor gap. The controller voltage is decreased from a previously designed resonator to less than 9 V thereby reducing the load on the controller circuit components. Bifurcation diagrams are obtained showing the frequency and magnitude of AC voltage required for chaotic oscillations to develop. The information entropy, a measure of chaotic characteristic, is calculated for the micro-resonator and is found to be 0.732.