Micromechanical thermal actuator

The present invention provides a microelectromechanical element comprising a cold beam and at least a first beam pair comprising a first beam member and a second beam member, the beam pair being coupled to said cold beam by a free end tether and configured to elongate when heated to a greater temperature than a temperature of said cold beam thereby causing the assembly to deflect in a first direction determined by a movement plane. The first beam member and the second beam member of the beam pair are arranged to determine a beam plane such that the beam plane is at an angle ± from the movement plane where ±‰ KÀ and K is an integer. Various embodiments further relate to microelectromechanical element capable of performing unidirectional in-plane deflection, unidirectional out-of-plane deflection and bi-directional inplane deflection, as well as a latching relay using a combination of a unidirectional out-of-plane element with a bi-directional in-plane element.