A Novel Method for Investigating the Casimir Effect on Pull-In Instability of Electrostatically Actuated Fully Clamped Rectangular Nano/Microplates

The objective of the present paper is to represent a novel method to investigate the stable and unstable behaviors of fully clamped rectangular nano/microplates under the effects of electrostatic and Casimir pressures. To this end, the governing partial differential equation of equilibrium is considered and reduced to an algebraic equation using a simple and computationally efficient single degree of freedom (SDOF) model through the Galerkin weighted residual method. The linear and undamped mode-shapes of the plate are used in the Galerkin procedure as the weight function which is obtained by the extended Kantorovich method (EKM). The present findings are compared and validated by available empirical and theoretical results in the literature as well as those obtained by finite element (FE) simulation carried out using COMSOL Multi physics commercial software and excellent agreements between them are observed.