Publications

Aluminum Nitride Sensors for Harsh Environments

Fabian Goericke
Albert P. Pisano
Tsu-Jae King Liu
Liwei Lin
2013

Harsh environment applications include high temperature, pressure and mechanical shock. Aluminum nitride is a strong ceramic material with very good high temperature survivability. It also has piezoelectric properties that can be used for sensing applications and it can be deposited with good control as thin polycrystalline film for the fabrication of micro-electromechanical systems. In this dissertation, optimized deposition parameters for aluminum nitride films and characterization techniques for film stress gradients are investigated. Furthermore, two diff...

Microfluidic Reactors for the Controlled Synthesis of Nanoparticles

E. Yegan Erdem
Albert P. Pisano
Fiona M. Doyle
Liwei Lin
Tsu-Jae King Liu
2013

Nanoparticles have attracted a lot of attention in the past few decades due to their unique, size-dependent properties. In order to use these nanoparticles in devices or sensors effectively, it is important to maintain uniform properties throughout the system; therefore nanoparticles need to have uniform sizes or monodisperse. In order to achieve monodispersity, an extreme control over the reaction conditions is required during their synthesis. These reaction conditions such as temperature, concentration of reagents, residence times, etc. affect the...

Engineering Collective Behaviors

Daniel Cohen
Michel M. Maharbiz
Tejal Desai
Evan Variano
2013

Much of the world consists of many small things, animate or inanimate, interacting with each other to produce something larger than, and different from themselves. Comprising murders of crows, armies of ants, schools of fish, dunes of sand, and various organs in your body, the collective behaviors of these systems embody a different approach to engineering than we currently employ. This thesis explores three examples where principles from collective behaviors are deployed as engineering tools. The first example presents how the collective phenomenon of ‘percolation’ can be leveraged...

A Study of Mass Transport Towards the Design and Characterization of an Artificial Kidney

Peter Soler
Dorian Liepmann
Susan Miller
David B. Graves
Mohammad Mofrad
2014

This dissertation focuses on the design, fabrication, and study necessary for a renal cell device that mimics the bioreactor component of a bioartificial kidney. The motivation behind the project is to further the development toward an implantable bioartificial human kidney that will improve the quality of life for end stage renal disease (ESRD) patients. The bioartificial kidney system contains two units: i) a hemofilter based upon nanoporous silicon membranes, and ii) a bioreactor composed of kidney proximal tubule (PT) cells. The Roy group has pioneered work in membranes that have...

Thermal Ground Plane for Chip-Level Electronics Cooling

Hongyun So
Albert P. Pisano
Liwei Lin
Tsu-Jae King Liu
2014

The three-dimensional thermal ground plane was developed in response to the needs of high-power density electronics applications in which heat must be removed as close to the chip surface as possible. The novel design for this planar cooling device was proposed with three key innovations in the evaporator, wick, and reservoir layer, which provided enhanced and reliable cooling performance without wick dryout and back flows. For the evaporator and reservoir layer, a combination of a tapered channel and a triple-spike microstructure was designed to break up the pinned meniscus at the...

Templated Dry Printing of Conductive Metal Nanoparticles

David Rolfe
Albert P. Pisano
Liwei Lin
Amy Herr
2015

Printed electronics can lower the cost and increase the ubiquity of electrical components such as batteries, sensors, and telemetry systems. Unfortunately, the advance of printed electronics has been held back by the limited minimum resolution, aspect ratio, and feature fidelity of present printing techniques such as gravure, screen printing and inkjet printing. Templated dry printing offers a solution to these problems by patterning nanoparticle inks into templates before drying.

This dissertation shows advancements in two varieties of templated dry nanoprinting...

Carbon Nanotube Films for Energy Storage Applications

Alina Kozinda
Liwei Lin
Roya Maboudian
Dorian Liepmann
2014

With the rising demands for small, lightweight, and long-lasting portable electronics, the need for energy storage devices with both large power and large eneergy densities become vitally important. From their usage in hybrid electric vehicles to wearable electronics, supercapacitors, and rechargeable batteries have been the focus of many previous works. Electrode materials with large specific surface areas can enhance the charning speed and total amount of stored energy. To this end, vertically self-aligned conductivities as well as high mechanical stregth and large specific surface areas...

Droplet-Based Microfluidic Systems: Finger-Powered Pumps, Reactors and Magnetic Capsules

Kosuke Iwai
Liwei Lin
Albert P. Pisano
Luke P. Lee
2014

The combination of microfabrication and microfluidics has enabled a variety of opportunities in making new tools for biological and diagnostic applications. For example, microdroplets-based systems have attracted lots of attentions in recent years due to potential advantages in controlled environments with fast reaction time, high-throughput and low noises. This work presents a number of advanced microfluidic systems in process, control and manipulation of microdroplets, including finger-powered pumps to generate microdroplets, continuous-flow rupture reactors for the rupture and...

Assays and Tools for Biomolecular Analysis in Remote and Low-Resource Settings

Richard Henrikson
Luke P. Lee
2015

The global population faces significant challenges in not only improving health care, but even just in maintaining it. Environmental and economic disparities are increasingly creating a massive population that lacks adequate medical attention. Traditional tools employed to detect, monitor, and treat sickness are woefully inadequate in the face of this grand challenge in medicine. However, a new generation of technologies is under development that promises to increase both the access and the quality of care available on a global scale. These tools provide simple but powerful means for...

Wireless Sensing Applications for Critical Industrial Environments

Fabien Chraim
Kristofer S.J. Pister
2014

The widespread deployment of the World Wide Web over the past few decades has connected people globally. The next logical step in this evolution was to connect people to their environment. As public interest in the aging infrastructure grew, so did the desire to make this infrastructure safer and more environmentally friendly. This required the development of low-power wireless sensor networks to monitor and control this infrastructure, the so-called Internet of Things. With the introduction of low-power communication standards rooted in the Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH)...