Investigating the Influence of Piezoelectric Excitation on the Veering Phenomenon Associated with Electrostatically Coupled Micro-beams

This paper introduces piezoelectric excitation as a balancing mechanism for mode-localized mass micro-sensors. To this end, adopting the Hamilton principle together with the Ritz method, the non-linear reduced equations of motion governing electrostatically coupled micro-beams with piezoelectric layers are obtained. The free vibration equations associated with the present system are also extracted by linearizing the motion equations around the previously determined static configuration of the system. Solving the free vibration equations, the eigenvalue loci of the system are then plotted. Afterward, the influence of piezoelectric excitation on the veering phenomenon is studied. The results, whose accuracy is successfully validated by those available in the literature, reveal that piezoelectric excitation can drastically affect the veering phenomenon. For instance, it is observed that the application of the electrostatic voltage of 4V can be compensated by the piezoelectric excitation of -35.4695 mV so that the veering phenomenon will occur at the same coupling voltage. Given this important observation, the possibility of employing piezoelectric excitation in designing tunable resonant mass micro-sensors that operate based on the mode-localization phenomenon suggests itself.