Modeling Strategies for Electro-Mechanical Microsystems with Uncertainty Quantification

Microsystems are very small sensors and actuators, manufactured with the same technology as computer chips. Well known applications of these machines are the acceleration sensors in the Wii game console and the iPhone. At the micrometer length scales of microsystems the physical forces behave different when compared to devices operating in the...

Silicon MEMS for Detection of Liquid and Solid Fronts

High-precision manipulation of small-size objects is an attractive and challenging topic for both industrial production and fundamental scientific research. The capability of monitoring micro-samples during handling is essential to the accuracy and efficiency of a handling system for both liquid and solid samples. When handling liquid samples...

Thermal Actuation for Precision Micro Motion and Positioning

The primary goal of this research was to study the feasibility of a thermal micro actuator for improved tracking performance of a Hard Disk Drive (HDD), and the feasibility of thermal actuation for precision micro motion and positioning in general. The fast dynamics of the micro actuator allows it to quickly correct position errors and thus...

Uncertainty-based Design Optimization of Structures with Bounded-But-Unknown Uncertainties