David A. Horsley (Advisor)

An optical interrogation system for fiber Bragg grating (FBG) strain sensors suitable for use in wind turbine blade (WTB) composite I-beam structures has been developed and tested. An off-the-shelf MEMS-based tunable Fabry-Perot etalon is controlled with a real-time embedded digital signal processor to manage calibration, scanning, signal processing and communications with a host system. A single superluminescent diode sources broadband light to illuminate a single or arrayed set of FBG sensors. Reflected light from the sensors are routed to a photodiode, and is correlated with...

The purpose of this study is to design, fabricate and optimize microfluidic mixers to investigate the kinetics of protein secondary structure formation with Synchrotron Radiation Circular Dichroism (SRCD) spectroscopy. SRCD allows us to use wavelengths below 220 nm where differences between the CD spectra of random coil and the various secondary structure types are most pronounced. Microfluidic mixing allows a fast initiation of the protein folding reaction. By combining this with SRCD, we can clarify an intense debate in the protein folding community as to when, in the process of...

We constructed a pair of parallel conducting metal (Ag) plates separated by patterned molecular monolayers at the corners of the plates. A special metal deposition process was developed to ensure atomic scale flatness in the conducting plates. The separation between the plates can be controllably varied between several angstroms and tens of nanometers by varying the length of the molecules and/or employing conventional substrate processing techniques. The structure is an efficient sensor for detecting single molecules via surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). The unique...