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Increasing The Sensitivity Of Surface Acoustic Wave (Saw) Chemical Sensors And Other Chemical Sensing Investigations, Nina R. Smith Mar 2010

Increasing The Sensitivity Of Surface Acoustic Wave (Saw) Chemical Sensors And Other Chemical Sensing Investigations, Nina R. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

The work involves the fabrication and testing of three different surface acoustic wave (SAW) device designs, an investigation of nanowires sensitive to chemicals and preconcentrator prototypes to include with chemical sensors. The SAW chemical sensor designs include modifications to a basic SAW device to see if the sensitivity of the SAW device is increased. The modifications consist of etched trenches along the propagation field, coating the device with carbon nanotubes (CNTs) under the chemically sensitive layer and coating CNTs on top of the chemically sensitive layer. SAW devices are coated with Nafion®, a polymer sensitive to ethanol. The tests indicate …


Investigation Of Thermal Management And Metamaterials, Calvin T. Roman Mar 2010

Investigation Of Thermal Management And Metamaterials, Calvin T. Roman

Theses and Dissertations

Thermal metamaterials are materials composed of engineered, microscopic structures that exhibit unique thermal performance characteristics based primarily on their physical structures and patterning, rather than just their chemical composition or bulk material properties. The heat transfer performance attributes of a thermal metamaterial are such that similar performance cannot be obtained using conventional materials or compounds. Thermal metamaterials are an emerging technology, and are just now beginning to be acknowledged and developed by the microelectronics and material sciences community. This thesis effort analyzed the current state of thermal metamaterial research, examined the physics and theory of heat transfer and electrical conductivity …