Amplitude response of a unilaterally constrained nonlinear micromechanical resonator

Dynamical systems which involve impacts frequently arise in engineering. This paper reports a study of such a system at micro scale that consists of a nonlinear resonator operating with an unilateral impact. The micro resonators were fabricated on SOI wafers by using a one-mask process and then characterized by using the capacitively driving and sensing method. Numerical results concerning the dynamics of this vibro-impact system was verified by the experiments. Bifurcation analysis was used to provide a qualitative scenario of the system steady state solutions as a function of both the amplitude and the frequency of the external driving sinusoidal voltage. The results show that the amplitude of resonant peak is levelled off due to the impact effect and that the bandwidth of impacting is dependent upon the nonlinearity and the operating conditions.