Controlled generation of intrinsic localized modes in microelectromechanical cantilever arrays

We propose a scheme to induce intrinsic localized modes (ILMs) at an arbitrary site in microelectromechanical cantilever arrays. The idea is to locate the particular cantilever beam in the array that one wishes to drive to an oscillating state with significantly higher amplitude than the average and then apply small adjustments to the electrical signal that drives the whole array system. Our scheme is thus a global closed-loop control strategy. We argue that the dynamical mechanism on which our global driving scheme relies is spatiotemporal chaos and we develop a detailed analysis based on the standard averaging method in nonlinear dynamics to understand the working of our control scheme. We also develop a Markov model to characterize the transient time required for inducing ILMs. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3527008]