Early detection of HIV infection is the best way to prevent spread of the disease and to improve the efficiency of the antiretroviral therapy. Nucleic acid amplification tests (NAAT) have become the gold-standard for detecting low-concentrations of the virus in blood. However, these methods are technically demanding and cost-prohibitive in developing countries. Immunoassays are more affordable ...

This dissertation presents a distributed-parameters base modeling framework for microcantilever (MC)-based force sensing and control with applications to nanomanipulation and imaging. Due to the widespread applications of MCs in nanoscale force sensing or atomic force microscopy with nano-Newton to pico-Newton force measurement requirements, precise modeling of the involved MCs is essential. Al...

A cocaine-specific aptamer was used as a receptor molecule in a microcantilever-based surface stress sensor for detection of cocaine molecules. An interferometric technique that relies on measuring differential displacement between two microcantilevers (a sensing/reference pair) was utilized to measure the cocaine/aptamer binding induced surface stress changes. Sensing experiments were performe...

A highly sensitive and novel sensor platform for gases and volatile chemicals using microcantilever based potentiometry is reported. A resonant cantilever is used to detect the changes in surface work functions of functionalized substrates caused by adsorption of target gas molecules. Surface work function (SWF) changes were measured for different functionalization layers made of transition met...

Piezoelectricity in ferroelectrics arises from electrostriction biased by their spontaneous polarisation, which can be enhanced through a bias-induced polarisation. Doing so, the piezoelectric response tuned and significantly enhanced. In this study, ferroelectric polymer P(VDF-TrFE) was used to electro-mechanically excite silicon microcantilever. Using device, we demonstrate that polarisation ...

Microfabricated cantilever sensors have attracted much interest in recent years as devices for the fast and reliable detection of small concentrations of molecules in air and solution. In addition to application of such sensors for gas and chemicalvapor sensing, for example as an artificial nose, they have also been employed to measure physical properties of tiny amounts of materials in miniatu...

Recently, microcantilever-based technology has emerged as a viable sensing platform due to its many advantages such as small size, high sensitivity, and low cost. However, microcantilevers lack the inherent ability to selectively identify hazardous chemicals (e.g., explosives, chemical warfare agents). The key to overcoming this challenge is to functionalize the top surface of the microcantilev...