With areal recording density of hard disk drives (HDD) historically growing at an average of 60% per year, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to maintain the precise positioning required of the eversmaller GMR heads to read and write data. It is predicted that 100 Gb/in HDD areal density would be probably delivered by 2003. To reach such high track densities, the lower mechanical distur...

Bioprinting technologies allow the construction of tissue-like structures from different cell populations. Fundamental research on the influence of the cell micro-environment requires printing of single cells in specific patterns on a microscopic scale. Single cell printing of living cells has been performed by nozzle based techniques or micro-pipetting, and laser-induced forward transfer (LIFT...

The stick-slip friction system is known to exhibit very different macro and microscopic behaviors. For large movements, the system exhibits the familiar stick-slip friction characteristics; and for very fine movements, the elastic deformation seems to prevail. While there have been tremendous efforts to understand the stick-slip friction mechanism, most people would agree that the complexity of...

Semiconductor micro- and nanotubes can be formed by strain-induced self-rolling of membranes. The effect of geometrical dimensions on the self-rolling behavior of epitaxial mismatch-strained In(x)Ga(1-x)As-GaAs membranes are systematically studied both experimentally and theoretically using the finite element method. The final rolling direction depends on the length and width of the membrane as...

Direct writing of hierarchical micro/nanofibers have recently gained popularity in flexible/stretchable electronics due to its low cost, simple process and high throughput. A kinetically controlled mechanoelectrospinning (MES) is developed to directly write diversified hierarchical micro/nanofibers in a continuous and programmable manner. Unlike conventional near-field electrospinning, our MES ...

Design, fabrication and tests of a monolithic compliant-flexure-based microgripper were performed. The geometry design and the material tresses were considered through the finite element analysis. The simulation model was used to study in detail profiles of von Mises stresses nd deformation. The maximum stress in the microgripper is much smaller than the critical stress values for fatigue. The ...

A Galfenol driven miniature linear motor was developed in this paper. The proposed motor realized the micro stepping motion and based on the inertia impact and friction force. At first, the principle of impact driving mechanism was introduced, with the discussion of the structure of the given motor. Then, the analysis of the motor’s impedance property and shaft displacement was presented by sim...

Recently, micro-rotation confocal microscopy has enabled the acquisition of a sequence of slices for a non-adherent living cells where the slices' positions are roughly controlled by a dielectric-field biological cage. The high resolution volume reconstruction requires then the integration of precise alignment of slice positions. We propose in the Bayesian context, a new method combining both s...

Wind farm micro-siting is a complex process that requires multidisciplinary analysis and optimization. The problem consists not only of positioning the wind turbines in the locations within the site that have the most wind energy potential, but also it has to minimize wake interference between turbines. This means that usually the sum of the expected isolated turbines is less than the actual pe...