Collaborative Research: Exploitation of Finite Element Method in Robustness and Reliability Assessments for Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems

This collaborative research deals with the development of a rigorous finite element method-based approach to studying robustness and reliability of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS). Exploitation of the finite element formulation is proposed to incorporate higher order moments into the probability analysis without incurring excessive cost. The computational burden from introducing higher order moments will be eliminated by taking advantage of the finite element formulation of selective functionals. New modeling methods for MEMS will be explored and a variety of MEMS devices will be studied. To overcome the limitations of existing methods for propagating the effect of uncertainty, a reliability analysis-based procedure for probability analysis is proposed, which will achieve a good balance between accuracy and efficiency.

If successful, the research will benefit the MEMS community with improved quality assessment and a better understanding of the intrinsic relationship between robustness and reliability. The ability to efficiently evaluate higher order derivatives in the finite element method is also beneficial to other applications where this derivative information is needed. Comparative study on various methods for probability analysis can provide better guidelines for choosing the most appropriate technique. The reliability analysis-based procedure for probability analysis is expected to be applicable to design problems with nonlinear behavior and large uncertainty variations