Physical Sensors & Devices

Research that includes:

  • Silicon MEMS actuators: comb, electro-thermal, and plastic deformation
  • Precision electronic sensing and measurements of capacitive, frequency, and coulombic MEMS variables
  • Structures and architectures for gyroscopes, accelerometers, micro strain gauges for direct application to rigid structures e.g., steel, and levitated MEMS

BPN956: Time-of-Flight Hardware for the Solar Probe ANalyzer for Ions (SPAN-Ion)

Omar Alkendi
Lydia Lee
2023

Monitoring and building our understanding of space weather is necessary to protect current and future astronauts and hardware, as well as further our understanding of its effects on atmospheric development and loss. This project has developed two radiation-hardened sensor frontends to measure the ion composition of the solar wind aboard the Solar Probe ANalyzer for Ions (SPAN-Ion). SPAN-Ion uses time-of-flight mass spectrometry to distinguish ions by their mass: charge ratios; the target architecture for future missions decreases mass and increases speed in exchange for several orders of...

BPNX1004: Low Noise Electrochemical Aptamer-Based Sensing Device (New Project)

Ya-Chen (Justine) Tsai
2024

The Electrochemical Aptamer-based (E-AB) sensors provide continuous and real-time monitoring of specific target molecules, including proteins, antibiotics, neurotransmitters, and more. Due to the cost-effectiveness compared to enzyme sensing assays, E-AB platforms hold significant promise for point-of-care devices and precision medicine. However, sensitivity remains a challenge, particularly in the complicated environment, such as blood and serum. While research has achieved a noise level in the picoampere range, enhancing sensitivity is crucial for detecting trace amounts of certain...

BPNX1026: Strong, Tunable Mid-IR Emission from Black Phosphorous Ink Film (New Project)

Hyong Min Kim
2024

Black Phosphorus (bP) is a highly promising host material for future optoelectronic devices operating in the mid-wavelength infra-red (MWIR) regime of 3-5 um. bP is the most stable allotrope of phosphorous with a bulk direct bandgap of 0.3 eV that is highly tunable by alloying, applying strain, and varying the thickness, and with many remarkable electronic and optical properties ranging from low surface recombination velocity to high carrier mobility. Both MWIR LEDs and photodetectors based on mechanically exfoliated bP flakes operating at room temperature have shown superior...

BPN973: Piezoresistive Cement Paste for Structural Health Monitoring

Stuart McElhany
2024

Concrete is the most widely used engineered material in the world and finds use in nearly every aspect of civil infrastructure. Safety concerns posed by the aging of infrastructure combined with the prevalence of concrete in these systems highlights the demand for a concrete-composite capable of structural health monitoring (SHM) while being low-cost and easily implementable. Embedment of electrically conductive forms of carbon such as graphitic fibers and nanotubes allow for concrete and other cementitious composites to act as self-sensors capable of SHM through a...

Dehui Zhang

Postdoctoral Researcher
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
Professor Ali Javey (Advisor)

Dehui Zhang is a postdoctoral researcher in Electrical Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center (BSAC), and a research affiliate in the Materials Science Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2021, and was a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Los Angeles in 2021-2023. Dehui Zhang joined Javey Research Group in September 2023...

BPNX1024: Reusable Sweat Rate Sensor (New Project)

Seung-Rok Kim
Noelle Davis
2024

Sweat rate can provide the precautious signal of hyperhidrosis, hypohidrosis, and autonomic dysfunction. Currently, microfluidic and hygrometer-based sweat rate sensors are two types of available real-time sweat rate sensors. However, microfluidic device has issues of low temporal resolution, limited volume capacity, and surrounding artifact dependencies, while hygrometer-based devices also has overfilling and environmental artifact issues. In this work, we present reusable sweat rate sensor for continuous monitoring of sweat rate with novel sensor design.

Project...

BPNX1022: Gas Profiling for Human Health (New Project)

Carla Bassil
2024

It is well established that human skin constantly emits odors which vary with health or environmental conditions. In fact, canines have been trained to detect the changes in skin volatile organic compounds (VOCs) of epileptic and cancer patients. While a powerful tool for health monitoring, skin gas detection remains a largely untouched area due to the hundreds of different gases present at once. With recent advances in machine learning, ‘training’ an array of gas sensors to output a wholistic ‘gas fingerprint’ becomes a possibility. Challenges remain in sensor functionalization to...

BPNX1019: 3D Printing of Piezoelectric Materials and their US Transducers & Sensor Applications (New Project)

Haotian Lu
2024

The performance of ultrasonic transducers is largely determined by the piezoelectric properties and geometries of their active elements. Due to the brittle nature of piezoceramics, existing processing tools for piezoelectric elements only achieve simple geometries, including flat disks, cylinders, cubes and rings. While advances in additive manufacturing give rise to free-form fabrication of piezoceramics, the resultant transducers suffer from high porosity, weak piezoelectric responses, and limited geometrical flexibility. We introduce optimized piezoceramic printing and...

BPNX1013: 3D Printing of Architected Hydrophones with Designed Beam Patterns (New Project)

Victor Couedel
2024

Piezoelectric hydrophones are crucial for underwater applications such as communication and seafloor mapping. Limited by the brittleness of piezoelectric ceramics, conventional manufacturing methods restrict hydrophones’ shapes to simple geometries such as disks, cylinders, or spheres, which limits the sensitivity, directivity pattern, and working frequency bandwidth of the device.


We are developping a new class of high-performance 3D printed piezoelectric hydrophones consisting of rationally designed micro-architectures. Using a high-
...

BPNX1017: 3D Printing of Functional Materials (New Project)

Zhen Wang
2024

3D printing enables the fabrication of 3D functional materials with complex structures associated to various functionalities. Developing 3D printing resins with different properties promises to fabricate a myriad of complex functional devices with e.g., self-sensing, actuation, and structural elements assembled in a designed 3D layout. In this project, we explore the achievable property space and the material-performance correlation of 3D printing by designing a series of photo-curable resins. We unveil how the functional groups of the resins synergistically impact the...