A relationship based on the modified couple stress theory is developed to investigate the flexural sensitivity of an atomic force microscope (AFM) with assembled cantilever probe (ACP). This ACP comprises a horizontal cantilever, two vertical extensions and two tips located at the free ends of the extensions which form a caliper. An approximate solution to the flexural vibration problem is obta...

A relationship based on the modified couple stress theory is developed to investigate the flexural sensitivity of an atomic force microscope (AFM) with assembled cantilever probe (ACP). This ACP comprises a horizontal cantilever, two vertical extensions and two tips located at the free ends of the extensions which form a caliper. An approximate solution to the flexural vibration problem is obta...

One of the bio-sensing mechanisms is mechanical. Rather than measuring shift in resonance frequency, we adopt to measure the change in spring constant due to adsorption, as one of the fundamental sensing mechanism. This study explains  determination of spring constant of a surface functionalized micro machined micro cantilever, which resonates in a trapezoidal cavity-on Silicon wafer, with the ...

We cool the fundamental mechanical mode of an ultrasoft silicon cantilever from a base temperature of 2.2 K down to 2.9+/-0.3 mK using active optomechanical feedback. The lowest observed mode temperature is consistent with limits determined by the properties of the cantilever and by the measurement noise. For high feedback gain, the driven cantilever motion is found to suppress or "squash" the ...

Photolithographic methods allow an easy lateral top-down patterning and tuning of surface properties with photoreactive molecules and polymers. Employing friction force microscopy (FFM), we present here different FFM-based methods that enable the characterization of several photoreactive thin organic surface layers. First, three ex situ methods have been evaluated for the identification of irra...

Vibration energy harvesting with piezoelectric materials currently generate up to 300 microwatts per cm2, using it to be mooted as an appropriate method of energy harvesting for powering low-power electronics. One of the important problems in bimorph piezoelectric energy harvesting is the generation of the highest power with the lowest weight. In this paper the effect of the shape and geometry ...

Isogeometric cohesive elements are presented for modeling two and three dimensional delaminated composite structures. We exploit the knot insertion algorithm offered by NURBS (Non Uniform Rational B-splines) to generate cohesive elements along delamination planes in an automatic fashion. A complete computational framework is presented including pre-processing, processing and post-processing. Th...

The nonlinear pull-in behaviors of various electrostatic micro-actuators were simulated. The differential quadrature method (DQM) was applied to overcome the difficulty in solving the nonlinear equation of motion. Various types of micro-actuators, such as the cantilever beam actuator and the fixed-fixed beam actuator were derived and simulated to examine the feasibility of applying the DQM to t...

For more than two decades, the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) has provided valuable insights in nanoscale phenomena, and it is now widely employed by scientists from various disciplines. AFMs use a cantilever beam with a sharp tip to scan the surface of a sample both to image it and to perform mechanical testing. The AFM measures the deflection of the probe beam so one must first find the spring...