Nondestructive, high‐efficiency, and on‐demand intracellular drug/biomacromolecule delivery for therapeutic purposes remains a great challenge. Herein, a biomechanical‐energy‐powered triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG)‐driven electroporation system is developed for intracellular drug delivery with high efficiency and minimal cell damage in vitro and in vivo. In the integrated system, a self‐powered TENG as a stable voltage pulse source triggers the increase of plasma membrane potential and membrane permeability. Cooperatively, the silicon nanoneedle‐array electrode minimizes cellular damage during electroporation via enhancing the localized electrical field at the nanoneedle–cell interface and also decreases plasma membrane fluidity for the enhancement of molecular influx. The integrated system achieves efficient delivery of exogenous materials (small molecules, macromolecules, and siRNA) into different types of cells, including hard‐to‐transfect primary cells, with delivery efficiency up to 90% and cell viability over 94%. Through simple finger friction or hand slapping of the wearable TENGs, it successfully realizes a transdermal biomolecule delivery with an over threefold depth enhancement in mice. This integrated and self‐powered system for active electroporation drug delivery shows great prospect for self‐tuning drug delivery and wearable medicine.
This paper presents a preliminary result about ultra-deep etched microstructures on 〈1 0 0〉 silicon wafer based on metal assisted chemical etching (MaCE). Honeycomb hole arrays with 50 µm width were successfully etched, as deep as 280 µm. The porous defects on the patterned surface and the lateral etching on the sidewall were effectively suppressed by optimizing the etchant solution. The results in this paper indicate that 〈1 0 0〉 silicon can be etched vertically with smooth sidewalls by an etchant solution containing ethanol, instead of the conventional aqueous-based solution. This improved method of MaCE has potential application in large-scale Si etching as a supplementary method to the expensive and complicated dry etching method.
Piezoelectric micromechanical ultrasonic transducers (pMUTs) are new types of distance sensors with great potential for applications in automotive, unmanned aerial vehicle, robotics, and smart homes. However, previously reported pMUTs are limited by a short sensing distance due to lower output sound pressure. In this work, a pMUT with a special dual-ring structure based on scandium-doped aluminum nitride (ScAlN) is proposed. The combination of a dual-ring structure with pinned boundary conditions and a high piezoelectric performance ScAlN film allows the pMUT to achieve a large dynamic displacement of 2.87 μm/V and a high electromechanical coupling coefficient (kt2) of 8.92%. The results of ranging experiments show that a single pMUT achieves a distance sensing of 6 m at a resonant frequency of 91 kHz, the farthest distance sensing registered to date. This pMUT provides surprisingly fertile ground for various distance sensing applications.
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