Aircraft industry has to meet a challenge of reducing operational and maintenance costs. One of the possible ways for reducing these costs is the introduction of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). WSNs are already finding a variety of applications for both safety-critical and non-safety critical distributed systems. This paper deals with the application of WSNs for aircraft structural health moni...

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) provide efficient communication solutions to the ubiquitous healthcare systems. Health monitoring, telemedicine, military, interactive entertainment, and portable audio/video systems are some of the applications where WBANs can be used. The miniaturized sensors together with advance micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology create a WBAN that continu...

Deflection behavior of several encapsulant materials under uniform pressure was studied to determine the best encapsulant for MEMS device. Encapsulation is needed to protect movable parts of MEMS devices during high pressure transfer molded packaging process. The selected encapsulant material has to have surface deflection of less than 5 μm under 100 atm vertical loading. Deflection was simulat...

We consider a surface designed to convey fragile and tiny micro-objects. It is composed of an array of decentralized blocks that contain MEMS valves. We are interested in the dynamics of the optimal path between two blocks in the surface. The criteria used for optimal paths are related to the degradation of the MEMS, namely its remaining useful life and its transfer time. We study and analyze t...

This paper explores a novel concept called Mobile Electronic Memo whose purpose is to overcome the limitations in terms of interoperability and accessibility imposed by the current technology. To achieve this goal, Mobile Electronic Memos decouple the semantics of the information from the physical and pragmatic constraints of the medium that transports it. We examine related works and standards...

The photosynthetic cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus PCC7942 has recently gained great attention for its ability to directly convert CO2 into renewable chemicals upon genetic engineering. Thus, it is of great interest to increase the growth speed and lower the medium requirement for cultivating this cyanobacterium. The cultivation medium of Synechococcus elongatus PCC7942 has been develope...

Electrical testing of MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) can take on many different forms including wafer probing, electrical trimming, final test at temperatures, engineering characterization, and reliability evaluations. MEMS testing has had limited visibility in literature from companies that have successfully industrialized applications such as pressure sensors and accelerometers. This l...

Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) have gained acceptance as viable products for many commercial and government applications. MEMS are currently being used as displays for digital projection systems, sensors for airbag deployment systems, inkjet print head systems, and optical routers. This paper will discuss current and future MEMS applications.

Stiction is a major failure in microelectromechanical system (MEMS) devices in which two contacting surfaces can remain stuck together because of the adhesive forces. Due to the difference between the surfaces roughness and the adhesive force range, the real contact areas are usually smaller than the apparent one, resulting in a scatter in the adhesive forces. Consequently, the stiction is an u...