Engineering Commons^™

Machine Learning Augmentation Micro-Sensors For Smart Device Applications, Mohammad H. Hasan

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Novel smart technologies such as wearable devices and unconventional robotics have been enabled by advancements in semiconductor technologies, which have miniaturized the sizes of transistors and sensors. These technologies promise great improvements to public health. However, current computational paradigms are ill-suited for use in novel smart technologies as they fail to meet their strict power and size requirements. In this dissertation, we present two bio-inspired colocalized sensing-and-computing schemes performed at the sensor level: continuous-time recurrent neural networks (CTRNNs) and reservoir computers (RCs). These schemes arise from the nonlinear dynamics of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), which facilitates computing, and the inherent ability …

Near-Field Thermal Radiation For Solar Thermophotovoltaics And High Temperature Thermal Logic And Memory Applications, Mahmoud Elzouka

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation investigates Near-Field Thermal Radiation (NFTR) applied to MEMS-based concentrated solar thermophotovoltaics (STPV) energy conversion and thermal memory and logics. NFTR is the exchange of thermal radiation energy at nano/microscale; when separation between the hot and cold objects is less than dominant radiation wavelength (~1 μm). NFTR is particularly of interest to the above applications due to its high rate of energy transfer, exceeding the blackbody limit by orders of magnitude, and its strong dependence on separation gap size, surface nano/microstructure and material properties.

Concentrated STPV system converts solar radiation to electricity using heat as an intermediary through a …

Combining In Situ Tensile Testing And Orientation Microscopy In The Sem: A Mems Based Setup For Studying Time Dependent Deformation Of Thin Films By Tkd And Stem, Jan Philipp Liebig, Benoit Merle, Mathias Goken

Nanomechanical Testing in Materials Research and Development V

Structures in integrated devices are constantly subjected to residual or thermal stresses during operation. Understanding the relaxation behavior of thin films is therefore critical for improving their reliability.

Recently it was shown that Transmission Kikuchi Diffraction (TKD) in the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) enables the determination of local crystal orientations with high spatial resolution using standard Electron Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD) instrumentation [1, 2]. Giving access to quantitative information on mechanisms like grain growth, grain rotation and strain gradient evolution, time resolved TKD stands out as a promising technique for the characterization of microstructural changes upon relaxation of thin films.

We …