The micromachining technology that emerged in the late 1980s is able to provide micron-sized sensors and actuators. These micro transducers can be integrated with signal conditioning and processing circuitry to form micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) that can perform real-time distributed control. This capability opens up new territory for flow control research. On the other hand, surface e...

Micro fuel cells (μ-FC) represent promising power sources for portable applications. Today, one of the technological ways to make μ-FC is to have recourse to standard microfabrication techniques used in the fabrication of micro electromechanical systems (MEMS). This paper shows an overview on the applications of MEMS techniques on miniature FC by presenting several solutions developed throughou...

RF MEMS switches can be used to achieve reconfigurability of various RF systems and in particularly for miniaturized antenna structures. In case of micro machined antennas, which involve low voltage signals, RF MEMS switches with low actuation voltage are required for achieving reconfigurability. The capacitive shunt switch derives its switching property from the significant difference of its c...

Sidewall roughness measurement is becoming increasingly important in the micro-electromechanical systems and nanoelectronics devices. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is an emerging technique for sidewall scanning and roughness measurement due to its high resolution, three-dimensional imaging capability and high accuracy. We report an AFM sidewall imaging method with a quartz tuning fork (QTF) for...

Searching and detecting in some harsh environments such as collapsed buildings, pipes, small cracks are crucial for human rescue and industrial detection, military surveillance etc. However, the drawbacks of traditional moving modes of current vehicles make them difficult to perform such tasks. So developing some new vehicles is urgent. Here, we report a Setaria viridis spike's interesting beha...

This paper presents a micro-fabricated flexible and curled PZT [Pb(Zr0.52Ti0.48)O3] cantilever using d33 piezoelectric mode for vibration based energy harvesting applications. The proposed cantilever based energy harvester consists of polyimide, PZT thin film, and inter-digitated IrOx electrodes. The flexible cantilever was formed using bulk-micromachining on a silicon wafer to integrate it wit...

In this paper we investigate, both experimentally and theoretically, the competition between different failure mechanisms (stretching, bending and curvature l ocalization) in freestanding submicron thin films commonly used in micro-electromechanical systems. Micro structures made of elastic -brittle materials such as ultrananocrystalline diamond, diamond like carbon and silicon nitride, as well...

This paper describes the design and analysis of a particular micro-electromechanical-system (MEMS) micromirror device that can be used for an optical switching application. Analytical expressions for electrostatic torque and restoring torque of serpentine springs are derived. The performance of the proposed structure is compared with the existing structures having straight torsional beams. The ...

Some complex systems experience multiple dependent competing failure processes, and many traditional approaches to reliability are inadequate or inappropriate because there are two or more dependent/correlated failure processes and multiple components subject to failure. A typical design example representative of these systems is Micro-ElectroMechanical Systems. The dependency among the failure...