ABSTRACT
High technology has done us one great service: It has re-taught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks-chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring....
Edward Abbey
In his classic The Feynman Lectures on Physics (Volume 1, Chapter 44), the physicist Richard P. Feynman describes a simple heat engine constructed from rubber bands and a light bulb. In Feynman’s system, elastic bands form the spokes of a wheel as shown in Figure 6.1. When one side of the wheel is heated, the elastic bands shrink thereby shifting the center of gravity of the wheel, causing it to rotate. This is an example of a thermal-elastic1 system where thermal gradients create elastic stress and this stress is used to perform work. In this chapter we investigate MEMS and NEMS devices that exploit coupled thermal-elastic effects to push, pull, pump, bend, slide, and even crawl.
