Roya Maboudian (Advisor)

Sensing in harsh environment, especially high temperature environment, is drawing more attention, with potential applications in energy sector. The motivations are that enhanced (pressure, temperature, chemical) sensing will allow more efficient operation, enabling condition- based monitoring and reducing unwanted emission. State-of-the-art sensing technology remains limited, either not capable of long-term online monitoring under high temperature due to materials failure or, occupying too much space. We propose to adapt MEMS fabrication process and concepts to our proposed research...

We are designing a conductometric soot sensor that measures the change in conductance resulting from soot deposition onto the sensor. Although previous work has been done on conductometric soot sensing, current sensors are power intensive (5-30 W) and slow (60-170 s between sensing cycles) due to their large size, ineffective thermal insulation, and the high currents required for soot combustion (when self-regenerating). We propose to use MEMS fabrication methods to develop a miniaturized conductometric soot sensor with a built-in polysilicon microheater for self-regeneration, whose...

Recently, silicon-based supercapacitors have received considerable attention for application in mobile and remote sensing platforms due to their unique properties such as high surface area, low cost, long lifetimes, and excellent charge–discharge capability. These promising energy storage devices store more energy than conventional dielectric capacitors and deliver higher power with longer cycle life than available battery technologies. Recent studies in the field of supercapacitors have focused on the realization of hybrid materials to further improve the energy density of...

Controlling and concentrating infrared radiation has the potential to significantly impact infrared sensors, thermal imaging devices, as well as heat conversion systems. As most molecules have vibrational modes in the infrared range, they reradiate a great portion of the incident radiation instead of efficiently transmitting it. As a promising alternative, plasmonic gratings not only offer low-loss transmission of infrared radiation, but also compress the long infrared wavelengths. This localization effect greatly improves the sensing resolution and offers high-intensity fields at...