Bahman Daneshian (Structural Analysis, HSU)
Recent scientific works show the beneficial use of MEMS resonators in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) applications. In these applications, silicon micro-resonators allow for high-quality measurements of propagating waves, leading to substantiated conclusions regarding the health state of the investigated engineering structure. The MEMS resonators usually include a silicon cantilever in the middle of the MEMS chamber surrounded with pure nitrogen gas at room temperature and ambient pressure. Due to the small size of the silicon cantilever, damping effects by the surrounding nitrogen gas might play an essential role in measuring and interpreting the collected wave data. Hence, when interpreting the measured wave data, understanding the possible squeeze-film damping effect caused by the surrounding gas is essential.
This study employs computer simulation to investigate such influence via large-scale Molecular Dynamics (MD) using LAMMPS on the existing supercomputer at Helmut Schmidt University (HSUper). LAMMPS is highly flexible and parallelized software for simulating large-scale atomic and molecular dynamics across scales.