Technical Papers and Presentations

This work describes the study of a thermal actuator and modifications to the materials employed in order to decrease power consumption and implementation costs. For this study, we worked on improving the thermal actuator described in the work of T. Ebefors. The criteria for choosing the new materials were lower power consumption, commercial availability, and ease processing. The thermal actuator was simulated using COMSOL Multiphysics with help of the Heat Transfer Module,  and the Structural Mechanics Module, to estimate the actuator’s total displacement, power consumption and maximum temperatures.