Probabilistic prediction of the quality factor of micro-resonator using a stochastic thermo-mechanical multi-scale approach

As the size of the device is only one or two orders of magnitude higher than the size of the grains, the structural properties, such as the thermo-elastic quality factor (Q), of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) made of poly-crystalline materials exhibit a scatter, due to the existing randomness in the grain size, grain orientation, surface roughness...

In order to predict the probabilistic behavior of micro-resonators, the authors extend herein a previously developed stochastic 3-scale approach [1] to the case of thermoelastic damping [2]. In this method, stochastic volume elements (SVEs) [3] are defined by considering random grain orientations in a tessellation. For each SVE realization, the mesoscopic apparent elasticity tensor, thermal conductivity tensor, and thermal dilatation tensor can be obtained using thermo-mechanical computational homogenization theory [4]. The extracted mesoscopic apparent properties tensors can then be used to define a spatially correlated meso-scale random field, which is in turn used as input for stochastic finite element simulations. As a result, the probabilistic distribution of the quality factor of micro-resonator can be extracted by considering Monte-Carlo simulations of coarse-meshed micro-resonators, accounting implicitly for the random micro-structure of the poly-silicon material.

[1] V. Lucas, J.-C. Golinval, S. Paquay, V.-D. Nguyen, L. Noels, L. Wu, A stochastic computational multiscale approach; Application to MEMS resonators. Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 294, 141-167, 2015.
[2] L. Wu, V. Lucas, V.-D. Nguyen, J.-C. Golinval, S. Paquay, L. Noels, A Stochastic Multiscale Approach for the Modeling of Thermoelastic Damping in Micro-Resonators. Submitted.
[3] M. Ostoja-Starzewski, X.Wang, Stochastic finite elements as a bridge between random material microstructure and global response, Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 168, 35--49, 1999.
[4] I. Özdemir, W. A. M. Brekelmans, M. G. D. Geers, Computational homogenization for heat conduction in heterogeneous solids, International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering 73, 185-204, 2008.