An analytical analysis of a compressed bistable buckled beam

A theoretical treatment to model the snap-through of a double-clamped beam is given. Starting from a classical theory for ‘slender beams’ the model is extended to also take compression into account. This significantly changes the predicted snap-through path, and may also change the snapping mechanism to a different regime where the maximum force is set by compression rather than the Euler instability. It is also shown that the model can be used for a class of non-homogeneous sandwich beams such as those micromachined in our referred experiment.