The use of high performance composite materials provides a substantial performance improvement for microrobotics. Such materials have great benefits over common MEMs materials such as better fracture toughness and fatigue properties than semiconductors, and higher stiffness to weight ratios than most metals. Composite structures yield remarkable improvements in microrobotic links and joints, as...

The first force map has been generated for a 2 DOF wing designed for the MFI project. For the wing beating at a resonance frequency of 139 Hz, the average 3-D forces were found as a function of sinusoidal voltage amplitude and actuator phase difference. An image sequence of the wing trajectory allowed comparison to simulated forces using a quasi-steady state aerodynamic approximation. Finally, ...

Micromechanical resonators with fundamental vibrational mode frequencies in the range 10MHz–1GHz can now be fabricated [1, 2]. Applications include fast, ultrasensitive force and displacement detectors [3], electrometers [4, 5], and radio frequency signal processors [6]. However, the advances in the development of micromechanical devices also raise the fundamental question of whether mechanical...

Because of their high surface over volume ratio, the mechanical behavior of micrometer sized structures differs from that of usual macroscopic objects. Their surface plays a key role, and this property has been proposed to devise micromechanical sensors of environmental changes [1]. In particular, a significant effort has been put on the development of biological sensors [2], thus highlighting ...

Aligned, collagenous tissues such as tendons and ligaments are composed primarily of water and type I collagen, organized hierarchically into nanoscale fibrils, microscale fibers and mesoscale fascicles. Force transfer across scales is complex and poorly understood. Since innervation, the vasculature, damage mechanisms and mechanotransduction occur at the microscale and mesoscale, understanding...

Damping is a critical design parameter for miniaturized mechanical resonators used in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), optomechanical systems, and atomic force microscopy for a large and diverse set of applications ranging from sensing, timing, and signal processing to precision measurements for fundamental studies of materials science and quantum mec...

A new contact bond model based on the Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion has been implemented in PFC2D to reproduce the behaviour of frictional cohesive (c, φ) geomaterials. According to this model, the bond strength can be clearly divided into two distinct micromechanical contributions: an intergranular friction angle and a cohesive bond force. A parametric analysis has been run to validate the pr...

One of the most famous methods to predict the stiffness of short fiber composites is micromechanical modeling. In this study, a Representative Volume Element (RVE) of a beech wood flour natural composite has been designed and the orientation averaging approach has been utilized to predict its stiffness tensor. The novelty of this work is in finding the proper fiber orientation distribution func...