Investigation of thermoelastic damping in rectangular microplate resonator using modified couple stress theory

Thermoelastic damping is a significant energy lost mechanism at room temperature in micro-scale resonators. Prediction of thermoelastic damping (TED) is crucial in the design of high quality MEMS resonators. In this study the governing equations of motion and the thermal couple equation of a microplate with an arbitrary rectangular shape are derived using the modified version of the couple stress theory. Analytical expressions are presented for calculating the quality factor (QF) of TED in a rectangular microplate considering the plane stress and plane strain conditions. As a case study, a rectangular microplate resonator is considered with material property of gold that has a considerably high value of length-scale parameter in comparison with silicon and the effect of the length-scale parameter on the QF of TED is discussed in detail. The relation between QF and temperature increment for microplates with clamped boundary conditions based on plane stress and plane strain models are studied and results obtained by considering classical and modified couple stress theory (MCST) are compared. The effect of thickness of the plate on the rigidity ratio is studied and the critical thickness which is an important design parameter is obtained using the MCST for three boundary conditions. Variations of TED versus the plate thickness for various boundary conditions according to the classical and the modified couple stress theories are investigated.