Micromachines, Volume 9, Issue 5

This study reports double-stacked planar bilayer lipid membranes (pBLMs) formed using a droplet contact method (DCM) for microfluidic formation with five-layered microchannels that have four micro guide pillars. pBLMs are valuable for analyzing membr...

Semi-quantitative studies have located varied expressions of β-actin proteins at the population level, questioning their roles as internal controls in western blots, while the absolute copy numbers of β-actins at the single-cell level are m...

Micromixers are important components of microfluidic systems [...]

Herein, we describe a novel method for the assessment of droplet viscosity moving inside microfluidic channels. The method allows for the monitoring of the rate of the continuous growth of bacterial culture. It is based on the analysis of the hydrody...

This paper presents a demonstration of the feasibility of fabricating micro-cantilever harvesters with extended stress distribution and enhanced bandwidth by exploiting an M-shaped two-degrees-of-freedom design. The measured mechanical response of th...

In the typical Inertial Navigation System (INS)/ Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) setup for ground vehicle navigation, measures should be taken to maintain the performance when there are GNSS signal outages. Usually, aiding sensors are utili...

Diamond nanocrystals smaller than 100 nm (nanodiamonds) are now recognized to be highly biocompatible. They can be made fluorescent with perfect photostability by creating nitrogen-vacancy (NV) color centers in the diamond lattice. The resulting fluo...

In this paper, micro droplets are generated in a microfluidic focusing contactor and then they move sequentially in a free-flowing mode (no wall contact). For this purpose, two different micro-flow glass devices (hydrophobic and hydrophilic) were use...

Advances in nanotechnology and nanomaterials have enabled the development of functional biomaterials with surface properties that reduce the rate of the device rejection in injectable and implantable biomaterials. In addition, the surface of biomater...

Most portable electronic devices are power-limited by battery capacity, and recharging these batteries often interrupts the user’s experience with the device. The product presented in this paper provides an alternative to powering portables by...

This article reviews the autonomous manipulation strategies of biological cells utilizing optical tweezers, mainly including optical direct and indirect manipulation strategies. The typical and latest achievements in the optical manipulation of cells...

An adaptive multi-scale method based on the combination generalized morphological filter (CGMF) is presented for de-noising of the output signal from a MEMS gyroscope. A variational mode decomposition is employed to decompose the original signal into...

Based on the background of atomic force microscope (AFM) driven by piezoelectric actuators (PEAs), this paper proposes a sliding mode control coupled with an inverse Bouc–Wen (BW) hysteresis compensator to improve the positioning performance of...

In this work, a flexible micro-supercapacitor with interdigital planar buckypaper electrodes is presented. A simple fabrication process involving vacuum filtration method and SU-8 molding techniques is proposed to fabricate in-plane interdigital buck...

Engineering of neuronal network geometry by micropatterning technology is a key future technology for creating artificial brains on a chip. However, engineering of network geometry at the single-cell-level with functional morphology (axon/dendrite) a...

Electromechanical transducers that utilize the piezoelectric effect have been increasingly used in micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) either as substrates or as thin films[...]

Artificial synapses, with synaptic plasticity, are the key components of constructing the neuromorphic computing system and mimicking the bio-synaptic function. Traditional synaptic devices are based on silicon and inorganic materials, while organic...

Compared with the conventional compound eye processing method, a new fabrication method—namely, a mold casting method—was presented. This method is simple, low-cost, easy to implement, and can be reused. A bionic compound eye array model with 61 omma...

An electro-thermal model based on the Joule heating effect is proposed to simulate a single discharge in an electric discharge machining process. Normally, the dielectric strength of the hydrocarbons oil is approximately 20 MV/m, but it varies with b...

Decoupling research on flexible tactile sensors play a very important role in the intelligent robot skin and tactile-sensing fields. In this paper, an efficient machine learning method based on the improved back-propagation (BP) algorithm is proposed...

In this article, we have investigated the influence of the nitro side-group on the single molecular conductance of pyridine-based molecules by scanning tunneling microscopy break junction. Single molecular conductance of 4,4′-bipyridine (BPY),...

Optical tweezers, formed by a highly focused laser beam, have intriguing applications in biology and physics. Inspired by molecular rotors, numerous optical beams and artificial particles have been proposed to build optical tweezers trapping micropar...

Acceleration sensitivity in silicon bulk-extensional mode oscillators is studied in this work, and a correlation between the resonator alignment to different crystalline planes of silicon and the observed acceleration sensitivity is established. It i...

Although electroosmotic flow (EOF) has been applied to drive fluid flow in microfluidic chips, some of the phenomena associated with it can adversely affect the performance of certain applications such as electrophoresis and ion preconcentration. To...

Tactile displays have been extensively studied for several decades. However, owing to their bulkiness and stiffness, it has been difficult to integrate these displays with information devices to enable tactile communication between the devices and th...

This letter proposes a method for utilizing a positive photoresist, Shipley 1805, as a sacrificial layer for sub-180 °C fabrication process flows. In the proposed process, the sacrificial layer is etched at the end to release the structures using...

Transmembrane pressure across the glomerular filter barrier may underlie renal failure. However, studies of renal failure have been difficult owing to a lack of in vitro models to capture the transmembrane pressure in a controlled approach. Here we r...

In this work, we dealt with the optimization of the pulley-type ring resonator using the offset of the straight input and output waveguide at the junction with the curved waveguide. We adopted the finite-difference time-domain method to simulate the...

We present a flow cytometer on a microfluidic chip that integrates an inline lens-free holographic microscope. High-speed cell analysis necessitates that cells flow through the microfluidic channel at a high velocity, but the image sensor of the in-l...

Bubble actuated micro-pumps have great potential to be integrated into microfluidic systems to allow the independence of peripheral equipment. Previous studies on bubble actuated valveless micro-pumps have been mainly limited to experimental studies...

Medium exchange is the process of changing the suspension medium of cells/particles, and has applications in washing, surface modifications, nutrient replenishment, or simply changing the environment of the target entities. Dipping involves diverting...

It is difficult to cut hard and brittle quartz glass chips. Hence, a method involving micro-crack-induced severing along a non-crack microgroove-apex by controlling the loading rate is proposed. The objective is to realize the rapid and precision sev...

In this paper, we determine the smallest feature size that enables fluid flow in microfluidic paper-based analytical devices (µPADs) fabricated by laser cutting. The smallest feature sizes fabricated from five commercially available paper types...

A handy liquid metal based non-invasive particle microtrap was proposed and demonstrated in this work. This kind of microtrap can be easily designed and fabricated at any location of a microfluidic chip to perform precise particle trapping and releas...

A simple fabrication method for the surface modification of an electroosmotic silicon microchannel using thermal dry oxidation is presented. The surface modification is done by coating the silicon surface with a silicon dioxide (SiO₂) layer using a t...

We present an electromagnetically driven microscanner based on a gimbal-less twist mechanism. In contrast to conventional microscanners using a gimbal-less leverage mechanism, our device utilizes a gimbal-less twist mechanism to increase the scan ang...

A linear non-resonant kinetic energy harvester for implantable devices is presented. The design contains a metal platform with permanent magnets, two stators with three-dimensional helical coils for increased power generation, ball bearings, and a po...

Conventional electrical circuits are generally rigid in their components and working styles, which are not flexible and stretchable. As an alternative, liquid-metal-based soft electronics offer important opportunities for innovation in modern bioelec...

Tethered particle motion/microscopy (TPM) is a biophysical tool used to analyze changes in the effective length of a polymer, tethered at one end, under changing conditions. The tether length is measured indirectly by recording the Brownian motion am...

The fabrication of microdevices for fluidic control often requires the use of flexible diaphragms in a way that requires cleanroom equipment and compromises performance. We use a CO ${}_2$ laser to perform the standard ablative techniques of cuttin...

This paper presents a new 3D bottom-up packing technology for integrating a chip, an induction coil, and interconnections for flexible wireless biomedical applications. Parylene was used as a flexible substrate for the bottom-up embedding of the chip...

This paper presents a flame retardant 4 (FR4)-based electromagnetic scanning micromirror, which aims to overcome the limitations of conventional microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) micromirrors for the large-aperture and low-frequency scanning appl...

This paper presents an EMD (empirical mode decomposition)-based extraction approach to decouple the electric field fringe component impacts on the nonlinearity errors of a micro encoder-like capacitive displacement sensor. A calculated capacitance mo...

Microfluidic chips coupling with mass spectrometry (MS) will be of great significance to the development of relevant instruments involving chemical and bio-chemical analysis, drug detection, food and environmental applications and so on. In our previ...

A highly sensitive Gallium Nitride (GaN) diaphragm based micro-scale pressure sensor with an AlGaN/GaN heterostructure field effect transistor (HFET) deflection transducer has been designed and fabricated for high temperature applications. The perfor...

A hydrophilic line on a hydrophobic surface was fabricated by using plasma etching and laser ablation processing in this paper. We fabricated the nanospikes on a polyimide surface by using the plasma etching processing. CHF₃ plasma treatment for hydr...

The dental industry without lasers is inconceivable right now. This captivating technology has outlasted other possible alternative technologies applied in dentistry in the past due to its precision, accuracy, minimal invasive effect as well as faste...

In micromixer devices, laminar characteristics of the flow domain and small diffusion constants of the fluid samples that are mixed characterize the mixing process. The advection dominant flow and transport processes that develop in these devices not...

Microfluidic devices have been widely used for biomedical and biochemical applications. Due to its unique characteristics, polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) show great potential in fabricating microfluidic devices. Hot embossing technology has establish...

Vortex flow increases the interface area of fluid streams by stretching along with providing continuous stirring action to the fluids in micromixers. In this study, experimental and numerical analyses on a design of micromixer that creates vortex flo...