Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI), Austrian Academy of Sciences, Boltzmanngasse 3, 1090 Vienna, Austria Department of Electrical Engineering, Yale University, 15 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06520, USA National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, School of Physics, Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093...

Several soft lithography-based polymer microfabrication techniques are described. These processes are capable of producing polymer microstructures from various materials including piezoelectric and conducting polymers. Two of the methods described are also capable of producing freely suspended microstructures, an important step in the implementation of polymers as functional mechanical structur...

[1] In the past, texture-based classification of soils has been used for grouping soils in variably saturated water flow and solute transport studies. Classification of soils becomes especially important for large-scale studies where the spatial and temporal variability in the hydraulic properties of soils exceeds the field sampling capabilities. Although soiltexture-based classification has be...

Movable suspended microstructures are the common feature of sensors or devices in the fields of Complementary-Metal-Oxide-Semiconductors and Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems which are usually abbreviated as CMOS-MEMS. To suspend the microstructures, it is commonly to etch the sacrificial layer under the microstructure layer. For large-area microstructures, it is necessary to design a large numb...

Structuring SU-8 based superparamagnetic polymer composite (SPMPC) containing Fe3O4 nanoparticles by photolithography is limited in thickness due to light absorption by the nanoparticles. Hence, obtaining thicker structures requires alternative processing techniques. This paper presents a method based on inkjet printing and thermal curing for the fabrication of much thicker hemispherical micros...

The purpose of this study was to determine whether scale or otolith microstructures were more strongly related to fish growth. Scales and otoliths were sampled from 231 juvenile pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) collected from the marine waters of Southeast Alaska during two periods in 1993 and 1994. A computerized image analysis system was used to measure several periodic and non-periodic s...

In this paper, the hydraulic and heat-transfer properties of two sets of artificially fractured granite samples are investigated. First, the morphological information is determined using 3D modelling technology. The area ratio is used to describe the roughness of the fracture surface. Second, the hydraulic properties of fractured granite are tested by exposing samples to different confining pre...

The introduction of new materials and processes to microfabrication has, in large part, enabled many important advances in microsystems, lab-on-a-chip devices, and their applications. In particular, capabilities for cost-effective fabrication of polymer microstructures were transformed by the advent of soft lithography and other micromolding techniques (1, 2), and this led a revolution in appl...

Hydraulic cylinder actuators are used extensively in industrial, construction and agricultural works. The small sized outlet ports of the cylinders resist the flow of discharged oil; and as a result the piston motion is slowed down. This causes a lot of heat generation and energy loss within the actuators. The study investigates and analyzes the possibilities of reducing the hydraulic resistanc...

The concept of a hydraulic axis plays a central role within the design and analysis of hydraulic systems. A hydraulic axis comprises working, control, and supply elements that realize a subfunction of a hydraulic system. Analyzing a system’s functional structure means to identify the hydraulic axes along with their couplings. The paper in hand addresses this problem; it presents concepts and al...