Liwei Lin (Advisor)

Safe and deformable soft batteries are desirable for modern products that call for good safety features such as cell phones and good conformability to be embedded onto irregular surfaces in electronics systems. Current Li-ion batteries on the commercial market are rigidly packaged and hermetically sealed to prevent: 1) the intrusion of moistures which degrade performances; and 2) the leakage of toxic and flammable electrolytes due to mechanical damages. On the other hand, various deformable/stretchable batteries have been reported in research articles and they have shown good...

Sensing, actuation and imaging applications based on ultrasounds could expand to many applications by means of miniaturization and low power consumption via MEMS fabrication technologies. Piezoelectric micromachined ultrasound transducers (PMUTs) with thin film designs have emerged as key commercial products but current state-of-art PMUTs are limited by the acoustic power/pressure for applications within a limited range by using AlN as the piezoelectrical material due to its process compatibility with microelectronics. One BSAC industrial member has developed a process to make PMUT...

Insect-scale untethered flight with maneuverability is very challenging toward possible practical applications and attitude-stabilized flight (hovering) is one of the first steps for long-time air flight operations. In this project, we introduce the insect-scale, untethered, rotating-wing aerial vehicles with inherent stability by the gyroscopic effect to achieve several key advancements: (1) powered by alternating magnetic fields wirelessly; (2) 160-mg in weight and 20.0-mm-in-diameter in size – smallest untethered flying robot in the world; and (3) attitude-stabilized flights (...

The next big thing, AR/VR, requires an immersive Human Machine Interface (HMI) in addition to visual and sound stimuli. Although skin is the biggest organ in the human body, very few efforts compared to visual and auditory senses have been done to develop a “sense of touch”. The mechanical stimulus to generate the touch sense by the embedded mechanoreceptors in the skin at different depths has been created in many ways as vibratory actuators, microneedles, etc. In this project, we are investigating to create haptic interface via radiation force generated by piezoelectric...