Solid State Sensors and Actuators.

The development of custom micro and nano-scale sensors and actuators is essential for our exploration of mechanobiology, sensor networks or micro-scale material characterization. Transduction methods are selected based on the applications but we design tools leveraging piezoresistivity, piezoelectricity, comb-drive structures, electrochemistry, etc. Piezoresitivity in silicon cantilever structures has been explored in great detail in our lab. From this, our lab developed PiezoD, an open source software tool for modeling the performance and optimizing the design of piezoresistive and piezoelectric sensors and actuators.