Stationary solutions to a nonlocal fourth-order elliptic obstacle problem

Existence of stationary solutions to a nonlocal fourth-order elliptic obstacle problem arising from the modelling of microelectromechanical systems with heterogeneous dielectric properties is shown. The underlying variational structure of the model is exploited to construct these solutions as minimizers of a suitably regularized energy, which allows us to weaken considerably the assumptions on the model used in a previous article.


Introduction
Idealized electrostatically actuated microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are made up of an elastic conducting plate which is clamped on its boundary and suspended above a rigid conducting ground plate. Their dynamics results from the competition between mechanical and electrostatic forces in which the elastic plate is deformed by a Coulomb Partially supported by the CNRS Projet International de Coopération Scientifique PICS07710.
Dedicated to Michel Chipot on the occasion of his 70th birthday.
* Christoph Walker walker@ifam.uni-hannover.de Philippe Laurençot laurenco@math.univ-toulouse.fr 1 force induced by holding the two plates at different electrostatic potentials. When the electrostatic forces dominate the mechanical ones, the elastic plate comes into contact with the ground plate, thereby generating a short circuit and leading to the occurrence of a touchdown singularity in the related mathematical models, see [5,6,9,12,18,19] and the references therein. However, covering the ground plate with a thin insulating layer prevents a direct contact of the two plates and, from a mathematical point of view, features a constraint of obstacle-type which hinders the touchdown singularity. Different models have been developed to take into account the influence of the coating layer deposited on the ground plate, most of them relying on the so-called small aspect ratio approximation and describing the state of the MEMS device by the sole deformation of the elastic plate [2,3,14,15,20]. A more elaborate model is derived in [13,Section 5], in which the state of the device is not only given by the deformation of the elastic plate, but also by the electrostatic potential in the region between the two plates.
To give a more precise account, we restrict ourselves to a two-dimensional setting, neglecting variations in the transverse horizontal direction, so that the geometry of the device under study herein is the following, see Fig. 1. At rest, the cross-section of the elastic plate is D ∶= (−L, L) , L > 0 , and it is clamped at its boundary (x, z) = (±L, 0) . The fixed ground plate has the same shape D and is located at z = −H − d . It is coated with an insulating layer of thickness d > 0 with a priori non-uniform dielectric permittivity 1 > 0 and cannot be penetrated by the elastic plate. As a consequence, the vertical displacement u ∶D → ℝ of the elastic plate actually ranges in [−H, ∞) and the contact region {(x, −H) ∶ x ∈ D, u(x) = −H} between the insulating layer and the elastic plate might be non-empty. We assume also that the free space between the upper part of the insulating layer and the elastic plate has uniform permittivity 2 > 0 , and we denote the electrostatic potential in the device If v ∉S 0 , then S 0 (v) ∶= � . While S 0 (u) accounts for the non-penetrability of the insulating layer, the fourth-and second-order terms in (1.1) represent forces due to plate bending and plate stretching, respectively. These forces are balanced by the electrostatic force g(u) acting on the elastic plate, which is derived in [13] and involves the electrostatic potential u in the device. The latter solves the transmission problem in the domain Ω(u) , see Fig. 1. In (1.2), [[⋅]] denotes the jump across the interface Σ(u) , the dielectric permittivity is given by We note that (1.3d-1.3e) imply that h u satisfies and thus complies with the transmission conditions (1.2b), see [13,Example 5.5] for an example of functions h 1 and h 2 satisfying the above assumptions. With these assumptions, the electrostatic force g(u) is computed in [13, Theorems 1.2 and 1.3]. It has a different expression at contact points between the plates and at points where the elastic plate is strictly above the insulating layer. Specifically, introducing the coincidence set for u ∈S 0 , the electrostatic force is given by Stationary solutions to a nonlocal fourth-order elliptic… . It is readily seen from (1.5) that g(u) features a nonlinear and nonlocal dependence on u, the latter being due to the terms involving u in (1.5).
The investigation of the solvability of (1.1-1.2) is initiated in [13], exploiting the variational structure underlying the derivation of (1.1-1.2) which implies that solutions to (1.1) are critical points in S 0 of an energy functional E, which is actually the total energy of the device. Specifically, consists of the mechanical energy and the electrostatic energy Then (1.1) subject to (1.5) is the Euler-Lagrange equation for minimizers of E in S 0 , see [13], and g(u) defined in (1.5) corresponds to the (directional) derivative of E e (u) with respect to u, see [13,Theorem 1.4]. The existence of solutions to (1.1) is established in [13,Section 5] by showing that the energy functional has at least one minimizer on S 0 . This, however, requires additional assumptions ensuring that the electrostatic energy E e (u) does not grow faster than ‖u‖ 2 H 1 (D) as well as the coercivity of the energy functional E. More precisely, to guarantee the former (see (2.2) below) we assume that there are constants m i > 0 , i = 1, 2, 3 , such that . The existence result from [13] then reads: Obviously, a first step towards a full proof of Proposition 1.1 is to solve the transmission problem (1.2) for the electrostatic potential u with sufficient regularity in order to give a meaning to the function g along with deriving suitable continuity properties. We refer to Sect. 2.1 for a detailed account on this issue (see in particular Lemmas 2.1 and 2.2 where these results are recalled). A second essential step in the proof of Proposition 1.1 consists of deriving the coercivity of the energy functional E on S 0 . This property is ensured by assumption (1.10) (along with (1.7)). In particular, if > 0 , then the mechanical energy E m involves a super-quadratic term which allows a compensation of the negative contribution from the electrostatic energy E e .

3
Stationary solutions to a nonlocal fourth-order elliptic… and so that the formula (1.5) for g(u) simplifies and becomes g(u) = (u) in (1.5a). In particular, the function g(u) is non-negative.
The aim of the present work is to establish the existence of a solution to (1.1) under considerably weaker assumptions. In particular, we shall get rid of the technical and somewhat artificial assumption (1.10). Since (1.10) is obviously satisfied when > 0 , we shall treat as zero in the following computations. Moreover, we no longer need a sign for the function g(u) and can slightly weaken assumption (1.9). Indeed, we only require that and that there is a number K > 0 such that (1.11). Also note that, due to (1.11a), the last term in the definition of g(u) in (1.5a) vanishes, i.e. g(u) reduces to With these assumptions we can now formulate the main result of the present paper. Since we no longer impose assumption (1.10) in Theorem 1.3, the boundedness from below of the functional E is a priori unclear, due to the negative contribution from the electrostatic energy E e . We thus shall work with regularized coercive functionals instead (see (2.1) below) and use comparison principle arguments to derive a priori bounds on minimizers of the regularized functionals, see Sect. 2 below. We shall then prove that cluster points of these minimizers are actually minimizers of the original functional E. The full proof of Theorem 1.3 is given in Sect. 2 and relies on an idea introduced previously in a related work [10].
Finally, we provide an additional property of weak solutions to (1.1) when the potentials applied on the elastic plate and the ground plate are constant.

Auxiliary results
Let us emphasize that the function g(u) defined in (1.5) involves gradient traces of the electrostatic potential u , the latter solving the transmission problem (1.2) posed on the non-smooth domain Ω(u) which possesses corners. In addition, Ω 2 (u) need not be connected, but may consist of several components with non-Lipschitz boundaries (see Fig. 1), so that traces have first to be given a meaning. While the existence of a unique variational solution u ∈ h u + H 1 0 (Ω(u)) to (1.2) readily follows from the Lax-Milgram theorem, the required further regularity for u in order to make sense of its gradient traces is thus far from being obvious. Moreover, u (and hence g(u)) depends non-locally on u so that continuity properties with respect to the plate deformation u are non-trivial.
Nevertheless, relying on shape optimization methods and Gamma convergence techniques the following result regarding the existence of a solution to the transmission problem (1.2) and its regularity is shown in [13]. The regularity of u provided by Lemma 2.1 in particular guarantees that g(u) defined in (1.5) is meaningful for u ∈S 0 . As for the continuity of g(u) with respect to u ∈S 0 we recall:

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Stationary solutions to a nonlocal fourth-order elliptic…

Minimizers for a regularized energy
In the following we let > 0 and ≥ 0 and assume throughout that (1.  7). We shall now prove, for each k > 0 , the existence of a minimizer u k of E k on S 0 and subsequently derive an a priori bound on such minimizers, so that the additional regularizing term drops out in E k . We first show the coercivity of the functional E k .

Lemma 2.3 Given k ≥ H , there is a constant c(k) > 0 such that
From the definition of E k we then obtain by gathering the two limits that for all w ∈ S 0 . Since S 0 is dense in S 0 , this inequality also holds for any w ∈S 0 , and we thus have shown that u k satisfies the variational formulation of (2.4). ◻

A priori bounds
We shall now show that u k is a priori bounded for k large enough (making the additional term in E k superfluous). To this aim we need an a priori bound for the solution to the fourth-order boundary value problem (2.5) subject to suitable Dirichlet boundary conditions as stated below. The bound relies on the maximum principle for the fourth order operator 4 x − 2 x with clamped boundary conditions [4,8,11,17]. Since G 0 ≥ 0 we deduce that P ≥ 0 in (0, 1) from a version of Boggio's comparison principle [4,8,11,17] . Testing (2.10) by P we get Since we infer from the above inequalities that ∈ (a, b) , (2.10) y ∈ (0, 1) , P(0) = P � (0) = P(1) = P � (1) = 0 .
Next, since u k ∈ C(D) with u k (±L) = 0 , the set {x ∈ D ∶ u k (x) > −H} is a nonempty open subset of D. Owing to [1, IX.Proposition 1.8] we can thus write it as a countable union of open intervals (I j ) j∈J . Consider a fixed j ∈ J and let S I j denote the solution to (2.5) in I j subject to the associated boundary conditions on I j listed in (2.6-2.9), which vary according to whether Ī j ⊂ D or not. Then Lemma 2.5 yields a constant 0 > H (independent of j ∈ J ) such that Note that, by definition of I j , the function u k restricted to I j satisfies the same boundary conditions on I j as S I j . Hence, for z ∶= u k − S I j ∈ H 2 (I j ) we have z = x z = 0 on I j . Moreover, if ∈ D(I j ) , then u k ± ∈S 0 for > 0 small enough since u k > −H in the support of . Invoking the weak formulation of (2.4) we derive hence Thus, we conclude that z = u k − S I j ∈ H 2 (I j ) weakly solves the boundary value problem Now, since g(u k ) + A(u k − k) + ∈ L 2 (I j ) by Lemma 2.2 (a), classical elliptic regularity theory [7] entails that z = u k − S I j ∈ H 4 (I j ) is a strong solution to (2.14). Furthermore, it follows from (2.12) and the non-negativity of A(u k − k) + that the right-hand side of (2.14a) is a non-positive function. Boggio's comparison principle [4,8,11,17] then implies that z = u k − S I j < 0 in I j . Consequently, we infer from (2.13) that ‖u k ‖ L ∞ (I j ) ≤ 0 . Since 0 is independent of j ∈ J and (I j ) j∈J covers {x ∈ D ∶ u k (x) > −H} , the assertion follows. ◻

Proof of Theorem 1.3
We are now in a position to finish off the proof of Theorem 1.3. Indeed, if u k ∈S 0 is the minimizer of the functional E k on S 0 provided by Proposition 2.4, then −H ≤ u k ≤ 0 in D due to Proposition 2.6. Consequently, for k ≥ 0 we have (2.14b) z = x z = 0 on I j . (2.15)

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Stationary solutions to a nonlocal fourth-order elliptic… Now, since 0 ∈S 0 it follows from Lemma 2.3 that, for k ≥ 0 , Thus, (u k ) k≥ 0 is bounded in H 2 (D) so that there is a subsequence (not relabeled) converging weakly in H 2 (D) and strongly in H 1 (D) towards some u * ∈S 0 . Since E m is weakly lower semicontinuous on H 2 (D) and since E e is continuous with respect to the weak topology of H 2 (D) owing to Lemma 2.2 (b), we obtain from (2.15) that recalling that the continuous embedding of H 1 (D) in C(D) readily implies that Therefore, u * ∈S 0 minimizes E on S 0 . Now [13,Theorem 5.3] entails that u * satisfies the variational inequality (1.1). Alternatively, one can use the weak convergence in H 2 (D) and the strong convergence in H 1 (D) of (u k ) k≥ 0 to u * to pass to the limit k → ∞ in (2.4), observing that (g(u k )) k≥ 0 converges to g(u) in L 2 (D) by Lemma 2.2 (b) and that (u k − k) + = 0 for k ≥ 0 . This proves Theorem 1.3.  ∶= (a, b) . We may then argue as in the proof of Proposition 2.6 to conclude that z ∶= u + H ∈ H 4 (I) ∩ H 2 D (I) is a strong solution to the boundary value problem Another application of a version of Boggio's comparison principle [4,8,11,17] implies z = u + H ≤ 0 in I. But this contradicts u > −H in I. ◻ Acknowledgements Open Access funding provided by Projekt DEAL.

Compliance with ethical standards
Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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