Near Vacuum Gas Damping in MEMS: Simplified Modeling

We propose a simplified, fast, and operative simulation tool for the prediction of gas damping occurring in the microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) of arbitrarily complex geometry and motion, working in near vacuum in a pressure range around 1 mbar. The tool is based on precomputed lookup tables (distributed with the paper), providing dissipation for the elemental blocks of MEMS. Next, adopting a decoupling assumption, blocks are combined according to the topology of the device to be analyzed. Particular attention is devoted to the validation of working hypotheses using numerical data generated by a refined model, data taken from the literature for simple test devices, and new experimental results for industrial gyroscopes.