Energy harvesting from surrounding environment has been attractive for many researchers in recent years. Therefore, developing appropriate test apparatus to study energy harvesting mechanisms and their performance is of paramount importance. Due to their electromechanical characteristics, piezoelectric materials are used for harvesting energy from environmental vibrations. For optimum utili...

Energy harvesting from surrounding environment has been attractive for many researchers in recent years. Therefore, developing appropriate test apparatus to study energy harvesting mechanisms and their performance is of paramount importance. Due to their electromechanical characteristics, piezoelectric materials are used for harvesting energy from environmental vibrations. For optimum utili...

trans-Caryophyllene is a major component in the essential oils of various species of medicinal plants used in popular medicine in Brazil. It belongs to the chemical class of the sesquiterpenes and has been the subject of a number of studies. Here, we evaluated the effects of this compound in airway smooth muscle. The biological activities of trans-caryophyllene were examined in isolated bath or...

Piezoelectric ceramic Lead Zirconate Titanate (PZT) transducers, working on the principle of electromechanical impedance (EMI), are increasingly applied for structural health monitoring (SHM) in aerospace, civil and mechanical engineering. The PZT transducers are usually surface bonded to or embedded in a structure and subjected to actuation so as to interrogate the structure at the desired fre...

An efficient black-box algorithm for self-consistent analysis of three-dimensional (3-D) microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) is described. The algorithm is matrix-free based and employs a multilevel Newton technique to solve the coupled electromechanical equations. The new approach is shown to converge very rapidly and is much faster than relaxation algorithm for tightly coupled cases. While ...

We show that nanometer-scale dielectric thin films can act as efficient electromechanical transducers to simultaneously drive and sense the vibration of the first flexural mode of micro/nano-cantilevers. Here, 16 μm-long, 5 μm-wide and 350 nm-thick cantilevers are actuated by a 15 nm-thick silicon nitride layer, and electrically detected by charge measurement at megahertz frequencies. The displ...

The paper demonstrates the use of probabilistic methods to assess the electromechanical behavior of micro electromechanical systems (MEMS) under the presence of micromachining manufacturing and process uncertainties. Probabilistic Methods are used to assess uncertainties involved in the manufacturing of MEMS devices. Probabilistic methods guide the design of these devices to achieve a robust an...

INTRODUCTION Throughout Great Britain, increasing numbers of women having an early medical abortion are choosing to go home soon after administration of misoprostol, to expel the pregnancy at home (early medical discharge, EMD), rather than remain upon the hospital premises (day case). However, data are lacking on how this impacts upon an abortion service in terms of unscheduled re-attendance r...