Electrothermal Actuator Performance Analysis via the Moving Least Square Method

This paper presents a case study demonstrating the use of the moving least square method (MLS) for modeling the mechanical response of an electrothermal microactuator. Under the MLS framework, the governing equations for heat transfer and structural mechanics are discretized across the computational domain. The resulting discrete electrothermal system is solved accurately through an incremental load and Newton-Raphson iterative method to determine the temperature field. Subsequently, the displacement field is obtained by solving the discrete mechanical equation, which includes contributions from natural boundary conditions. Convergence of the temperature solution is rigorously evaluated across different iterative schemes. The accuracy of the MLS solutions is validated against experimental temperature data and finite element method (FEM) simulations. Results indicate that the temperature distribution obtained from the MLS aligns well with both experimental and FEM results, even under idealized boundary conditions. Additionally, a similarly favorable comparison is observed between the displacement fields predicted by the MLS, polynomial point interpolation collocation method (PPCM), and FEM.