Pull-in curves determined with monolithic FEM models

This paper gives an overview of the different monolithic approaches to compute the pull-in curve for discretized models of electrostatically actuated microsystems that are currently available in the literature. A method to implement monolithic charge loading combined with path-following is proposed. The performance of the algorithms is tested with some numerical experiments: FEM models of microbeams, used to model micro-switches. The results show that the charge loading scheme provides a fast converging alternative to the traditional path-following approaches. Finally it is shown that the algorithm can be easily extended to handle bifurcations.