A Z-shaped electro-thermally microgripper fabricated using aluminum

MEMS microgrippers have been extensively developed for acting in the manipulation of small microelements and micro-assembly, but also for material characterizations. In this paper, we investigated a Z-shaped electro-thermally actuated microgripper to be fabricated using pure aluminum as structural material, by surface micromachining processes. Design, simulation, fabrication, characterization, and experimental tests and measurements were performed. Electro-thermo-mechanical FEM simulations were performed using Comsol Multiphysics software in order to describe the performance of the MEMS device. Experimental characterizations were performed and compared with the simulation results. The intention of this paper was to investigate the viability of pure aluminum as the structural material for microgrippers and as an inexpensive material to be used for MEMS fabrication with application in micromanipulation domains.