Electrostatic motors have traditionally required high voltage and provided low torque, leaving them with a vanishingly small portion of the motor application space. The lack of robust electrostatic motors is of particular concern in microsystems because inductive motors do not scale well to small dimensions. Often, microsystem designers have to choose from a host of imperfect actuation solutions, leading to high voltage requirements or low efficiency and thus straining the power budget of the entire system. In this work, we describe a scalable three-dimensional actuator technology that is based on the stacking of thin microhydraulic layers. This technology offers an actuation solution at 50 volts, with high force, high efficiency, fine stepping precision, layering, low abrasion, and resistance to pull-in instability. Actuator layers can also be stacked in different configurations trading off speed for force, and the actuator improves quadratically in power density when its internal dimensions are scaled-down.

静电电机传统上需要高电压并提供低扭矩，因此在电机应用空间中只占很小的一部分。在微系统中，缺乏稳健的静电电机尤其令人担忧，因为感应电机不能很好地扩展到小尺寸。通常，微系统设计人员必须从众多不完善的驱动解决方案中进行选择，从而导致高电压要求或低效率，从而使整个系统的功率预算紧张。在这项工作中，我们描述了一种基于薄微液压层堆叠的可扩展 3D 致动器技术。该技术提供了 50 伏的驱动解决方案，具有高力、高效率、精细步进精度、分层、低磨损和抗拉入不稳定性。