Behavior of Electrothermal Actuator Analyzed by Polynomial Point Interpolation Collocation Method

This paper presents a novel implementation of the Polynomial Point Interpolation Collocation Method (PPCM) for analyzing the coupled electrothermal and thermomechanical behavior of V-shaped microactuators. Within the PPCM framework, the governing equations for heat transfer and structural mechanics are discretized over the computational domain. The resulting discrete electrothermal system is solved in a fully coupled manner via an incremental load method to determine the temperature field. Subsequently, the displacement field is computed by solving the discrete mechanical equation, which incorporates terms from the natural boundary conditions. The MQ radial basis function behaves well in convergence when its parameters pa and pq are 1 and 1.8. Under a 6 V voltage, the difference between the PPCM and FEM temperature values is less than 1 °C. Meanwhile, the discrepancy between the PPCM and experimental temperature values is approximately 20 °C, corresponding to an approximate error of 10%. Furthermore, the displacement error between the PPCM and FEM is as low as approximately 2 μm under an applied voltage of 12 V. These results validate the PPCM for predicting the driving characteristics of V-shaped microactuators.