Design and Analysis of Electro-Thermal Grippers for Holding Micro-Components

Grippers are used to pick, hold and place macro/micro-components, which are widely used in the field of assembly. In this work, for the first time an electro-thermal gripper (collet) is designed and analysed using two thermal actuator structures with reverse currents in order to reduce the out-of-plane actuation for holding micro-components in a narrow range of sizes between 100 μm to 1000 μm. The electro-thermal gripper is designed and analyzed using Comsol Multiphysics Design and Analysis Software. The materials considered for the electro-thermal gripper are alluminium and steel. From the analysis, it is observed that in the case of alluminium electro-thermal gripper at 0.1 V, the in-plane displacement is found to be 22 μm and the out-of-plane displacement is found to be 0.1 μm. In the case of steel electro-thermal gripper at 0.1V, the in-plane displacement is found to be 0.1 μm and out-of-plane displacement is found to be 0.00005 μm. It is observed that alluminium results in better displacement compared to steel.