Project 6
Textile-Integrated MEMS for Distortion-Tolerant Soft Contact Arrays (Prof. Cindy Harnett, ECE)
(Prof. Cindy harnett, ECE)
Above: Springy MEMS pop-ups released under a woven fabric grip onto fiber bundles (bundle diameter: 100 microns). Fabricated in the University of Louisville REU program.
New distortion-tolerant electrical connection technologies are needed for the emerging field of wearable sensors made from materials that bend and stretch. This REU student would work at the boundary of microfabrication and textile engineering toward a fabric-like contact array that can tap into voltage sources on an underlying electrical grid without any need for alignment. We have already achieved an alignment-free contact grid in previous work using a diode array on a conventional printed circuit board that does not bend or stretch [1]. Our previous REU student showed that “pop-up” microelectromechanical (MEMS) devices [2] can clasp on to the fibers of commercially-produced fabrics (Figure 1) [3]. The next student will investigate how these structures interact with woven conductive, electromagnetic, and heating fibers in locally-produced fabrics, fibers that offer routes to control and collect power from soft contact arrays. They will be trained to evaluate the mechanical and electrical properties of these new advanced materials. Beyond technical experience, the REU students on this project will gain professional experience as they work alongside other research staff and students in the cleanroom and Dr. Harnett’s lab (www.harnettlab.org).
Schematic of sub-mm scale diodes in registration with a planar MEMS array before “pop-up” grippers are released to tether it to fabric. Click to see it move!
References
[1] Harnett, C. K. "Tobiko: A Contact Array for Self-Configuring, Surface-Powered Sensors." In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 2024-2028
[2] Moiseeva, E., Y. M. Senousy, S. McNamara, and C. K. Harnett. "Single-mask microfabrication of three-dimensional objects from strained bimorphs." Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering 17, no. 9 (2007), N63.
[3] Challa, Sushmita, Canisha Ternival, Shafquatul Islam, Jasmin Beharic, and Cindy K Harnett. 2019. “Transferring Microelectromechanical Devices to Breathable Fabric Carriers with Strain-Engineered Grippers.” MRS Advances, February 2019, pp. 1–8.
