Piezoelectric nanowires are promising building blocks in nanoelectronic, sensing, actuation and nanogenerator systems. In spite of great progress in synthesis methods, quantitative mechanical and electromechanical characterization of these nanostructures is still limited. In this article, the state-of-the art in experimental and computational studies of mechanical and electromechanical properti...

In single skeletal muscle fibres perchlorate causes a large shift of the potential dependence of contraction activation to more negative potentials without a corresponding alteration in the kinetics of the inactivation process.

A new electromechanical coupling model was built to quantitatively analyze the tuning fork probes, especially the complex ones. A special feature of a novel, soft tuning fork probe, that the second eigenfrequency of the probe was insensitive to the effective force gradient, was found and used in a homemade bimodal atomic force microscopy to measure power dissipation quantitatively. By transform...

A reduced order model for the small signal analysis of micromechanical structures (MEMS) has been extracted by applying model order reduction (MOR) to their finite element models. The low-order model conserves the accuracy belonging to the finite element method, while drastically reducing the computational time. Moreover, it gives a description of the device’s terminal behaviour and can therefo...

We explore a method for laser cooling and optical detection of excitations in a room temperature LC electrical circuit. Our approach uses a nanomechanical oscillator as a transducer between optical and electronic excitations. An experimentally feasible system with the oscillator capacitively coupled to the LC and at the same time interacting with light via an optomechanical force is shown to pr...

Owing to their mechanically tunable electronic properties, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been widely studied as potential components for nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS); however, the mechanical properties of multiwall CNTs are often limited by the weak shear interactions between the graphitic layers. Boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) exhibit a strong interlayer mechanical coupling, but their ...

functional grading to enable high-temperature electromechanical coupling R. Mbarki, N. Baccam, Kaushik Dayal, and P. Sharma Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, Texas 77204, USA Department of Mathematics, Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas 78626, USA Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 1...

We report on the characterization of nanometer-scale resonators. Each device incorporates one multiwalled carbon nanotube (MWNT) as a torsional spring. The devices are actuated electrostatically, and their deflections, both low frequency and on resonance, are detected optically. These are some of the smallest electromechanical devices ever created and are a demonstration of practical integrated...