Fast pulsed heating and impact cooling of thermal microactuators

This paper reports techniques to rapidly heat and cool thermal actuators in microseconds. Rapid temperature changes can lead to high-speed motion and many-fold improvement in load power delivery compared to that achievable with conventional thermal microactuator devices. Rapid heating is achieved by capacitor discharge across the heated element. Rapid cooling is achieved by impacting thin cold plungers that remove heat from hot actuator beams by ultrafast diffusion. We have fabricated and preliminary tested polysilicon thermal actuators based on these principles.