Xiaoyu (Rayne) Zheng (Advisor)

The development of 3D MEMS devices has enabled innovative sensor designs with enhanced functionality, yet conventional fabrication methods often impose geometric and process limitations. This work presents a micro-3D-printed tactile sensor, integrating 3D piezoelectric, capacitive, conductive and dielectric elements with a compliant mechanism to achieve high sensitivity and force decoupling capability. The sensor is fabricated using a multi-material digital light processing (DLP) method, followed by selective metallization to define conductive regions, enabling seamless...

The rapid development of additive manufacturing technologies has enabled the fabrication of truss metamaterials, i.e., a novel class of lightweight-yet-strong materials with engineered complex hierarchical structures. Manipulating the architecture over chemical composition dramatically expands the achievable materials design space, allowing to largely control the mechanical response of metamaterials. Despite the great advances made in this area, designing three-dimensional (3D) truss metamaterials under complex or extreme conditions with programmable response is still a...

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...