Intrinsic dissipation in microelectromechanical systems

The numerical evaluation of intrinsic dissipation induced by thermoelastic coupling is of paramount importance in microelectromechanical systems. This paper presents a finite-element based procedure for the computation of thermoelastic dissipation in microdevices. In case of ultrathin resonators, the experiments show that damping is strongly influenced by size-dependent phenomena. In order to simulate the scale dependence of dissipation, an enhanced nonlocal coupled thermoelastic model is introduced and the first results are discussed.