Determining pull-in curves with electromechanical FEM models

This paper presents a short overview of the different approaches to compute the pull-in curve for discretized models of electrostatically actuated microsystems that are currently available in the literature. The focus is on the so-called 'staggered' algorithms. A new method to improve these existing approaches by using charge loading is proposed. The performance of the algorithms is tested with some numerical experiments: FEM models of microbeams, used to model microswitches. The results show that the charge loading scheme provides a fast converging alternative for the traditional path-following approaches.