In the field of BioMEMS, pneumatic actuation has been a common feature in the production of "Lab-On-A-Chip" (LOC) devices due to their cheap production costs and well-established fabrication protocols, however, are limited by a lack of precise control and component sizes. Electrostatic actuators in turn offer a low power consumption and highly controllable alternative for LOC devices, however, the protocol to create these components is not as well established. Computational modeling can act as

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... powerful design tool allowing us to explore a large range of design permutations and allow us to analyze the results. The device that will be modeled is a novel Parylene-C and gold composite micromembrane that is planned to be utilized as an all-in-one electrostatic actuator for mixing, fluid control, and cell manipulation. Comsol Multiphysics is the finite element modeling program that was utilized to model the geometry of the device and simulate the physics environment. We recommend developing an adaptive mesh due to the varying size scale between the membrane length and thickness. We used theoretical equations under uniform load to initially validate our computational model before moving towards an analytical model derived for nonuniform loads to better match the electrostatic force. Data from the fabricated device was used for further validation and we were able to develop a correctional factor based on eigenfrequency comparisons between the model and the device to better improve our results.