Carbon Nanotube Micro-Opto-Mechanical Grippers
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Carbon Nanotube Micro-Opto-Mechanical Grippers Shaoxin Lu, Ye Liu, Ning Shao, and Balaji Panchapakesan Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, 19716
ABSTRACT We report the integration of single wall carbon nanotube ensembles into micro-mechanical systems to realize a new carbon nanotube micro-optomechanical system (CNT-MOMS). CNTMOM grippers were fabricated with CMOS compatible techniques involving nanotube film formation, wafer bonding, photo-lithography, plasma etching and dry release. MOM-grippers displacement of ~24µm was obtained from a gripper of 430µm in length under infra-red laser stimulus and continuous operation of more than 100,000 cycles was acquired. The optical power consumption of the gripper operation was estimated to be as small as ~240µW. This study is a good example of how nano-materials could be integrated into CMOS compatible techniques for applications in high performance MEMS and nanoscale actuation technologies.
INTRODUCTION Compared to electro-mechanical transduction, photomechanical actuation offers an alternative way to couple energy into actuator structures and brings distinctive advantages such as wireless actuation, remote controllability, electrical-mechanical decoupling, low noise, easier scaling down and elimination of electrical circuits. Unfortunately few material systems have been shown to exhibit photomechanical properties and are often not compatible with CMOS processing techniques. Photo-strictive materials such as PLZT ceramics [1], and chalcogenide glasses [2] were deemed to be traditional photomechanical actuation materials. However they only show small strains and the techniques are not compatible with CMOS/MEMS integration. Recently, increasing evidences indicate that carbon nanotubes have novel photomechanical actuation properties, showing promising potentials to achieve optical-mechanical energy transduction in carbon nanotubes and carbon nanotube/polymer composite systems. In the recent past, it was reported that single wall carbon nanotube/acrylic elastomer composite structures exhibit reversible light-induced elastic strain of up to 0.3 % [3]. Light induced reversible photomechanical actuation from multi wall carbon nanotube/polymer mixtures was also reported and further the direction of actuation was controlled by the pre-strain of the composite and by the alignment of carbon nanotubes [4, 5]. Despite of this growing interest in the photomechanical actuation of carbon nanotubes, practical micro- and nano-devices that utilize this principle have been elusive until now. In this paper, we report the integration of carbon nanotube ensembles into micro-mechanical systems by a CMOS/MEMS compatible fabrication process involving carbon nanotube film formation, film bonding to substrate, lithographic patterning and plasma
etching of carbon nanotubes. Novel CNT-MOMS grippers are fabricated based on surface micromachined SU8/carbon nanotube structures, which operates under infrared laser stimulus. While they opera
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