Electrostatically driven micro-hydraulic actuator arrays

This paper describes an all-electrical individually-addressable micro-hydraulic actuator array that produces high displacement and force by utilizing hydraulic amplification and electrostatic control, offering a considerable improvement in fabrication technique and performance over the recently-introduced micro-piston hydraulic actuator array. The fabricated micro system consists of 3×3 and 4×4 arrays of actuator cells. A curved electrode capacitive actuator with a diameter of 2236 ¿m driven at 200 V produces 30.0 ¿m deflection on the front side at 14.4 kPa of pressure which corresponds to 11.3 mN force generated by the capacitive actuator on the back side. Actuation occurs from DC to 15 Hz.