Electro-thermal analysis of an Al–Ti multilayer thin film microheater for MEMS thruster application

A multilayer thin film aluminum/titanium (Al/Ti) microheater is developed for the microthruster liquid propellant vaporizing and gas heating for increasing the specific impulse. The microheater was fabricated onto a Pyrex 7740 substrate using a Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems processing technology. A finite-element based multiphysics simulation was employed to simulate the microheater performance. The distribution of temperature and variation of the thermal deformation are simulated in modeling with the different input power. And the simulation shows that heat loss of the microheater is relatively low comparing with the normal heater. Subsequently an experimental testing of the microheater performance based on infrared imaging device was actualized with applied voltage from 5 to 36 V. An auger electron spectroscopy detection was employed to validating the assumption that Al layer oxidizing is the main reason of temperature higher in the test than simulation.