In this paper, a woven textile containing temperature and humidity sensors realized on flexible, plastic stripes is presented. The authors introduce two different sensors fabrication techniques: the first one consists of a conventional photolithography patterning technique; the second one, namely inkjet-printing, is here presented as an effective, lowcost alternative. In both cases, we obtain temperature and humidity sensors that can be easily integrated within a fabric by using a conventional weaving machine. All the sensors are fully characterized and the performances obtained with the two different fabrication techniques are compared and discussed, pointing out advantages and drawbacks resulting from each fabrication technique. The bending tests performed on these sensors show that they can be successfully woven without being damaged. A demonstrator, consisting of a mechanical support for the e-textile, a read-out electronic circuit, and a graphical PC interface to monitor the acquisition of humidity and temperature values, is also presented and described. This paper opens an avenue for real integration between printed electronics and traditional textile technology and materials. Printing techniques may be successfully used for the fabrication of e-textile devices, paving the way for the production of large area polymeric stripes and thus enabling new applications that, at the moment, cannot be developed with the standard lithography methods.Index Terms-E-textiles, humidity and temperature sensors, inkjet-printing, plastic and flexible substrates, wearable electronics. Manuscript

Microfabricated electrospray thrusters could revolutionize the spacecraft industry by providing efficient propulsion capabilities to micro and nano satellites (1–100 kg). We present the modeling, design, fabrication and characterization of a new generation of devices, for the first time integrating in the fabrication process individual accelerator electrodes capable of focusing and accelerating the emitted sprays. Integrating these electrodes is a key milestone in the development of this technology; in addition to increasing the critical performance metrics of thrust, specific impulse and propulsive efficiency, the accelerators enable a number of new system features such as power tuning and thrust vectoring and balancing. Through microfabrication, we produced high density arrays (213 emitters cm−2) of capillary emitters, assembling them at wafer-level with an extractor/accelerator electrode pair separated by micro-sandblasted glass. Through IV measurements, we could confirm that acceleration could be decoupled from the extraction of the spray—an important element towards the flexibility of this technology. We present the largest reported internally fed microfabricated arrays operation, with 127 emitters spraying in parallel, for a total beam of 10–30 µA composed by 95% of ions. Effective beam focusing was also demonstrated, with plume half-angles being reduced from approximately 30° to 15° with 2000 V acceleration. Based on these results, we predict, with 3000 V acceleration, thrust per emitter of 38.4 nN, specific impulse of 1103 s and a propulsive efficiency of 22% with <1 mW/emitter power consumption.

The dynamics of the out-of-plane comb-drive actuator used in a torsional resonant mode microscanner is discussed. The microscanner is fabricated using the standard SOI technology by Fraunhofer, IPMS and utilized in various display, barcode scanning, spectroscopy and other imaging applications. The device is a parametrically excited system and exhibits hysteretic frequency response, nonlinear transient response, subharmonic oscillations, multiple parametric resonances, and alternating-oscillation-frequency behavior. Analytical and numerical models are developed to predict the parametric system dynamics. The analytical model is based on the solution of the linear Mathieu equation and valid for small angular displacements. The numerical model is valid for both small and large deflection angles. The analytical and numerical models are validated with the experimental results under various ambient pressures and excitation schemes and successfully predict the dynamics of the parametric nature of the microscanner. As many as four parametric resonances are observed at 30 mTorr. The models developed in this paper can be used to optimize the structure and the actuator.

Characterization of bladder biopsies, using a combined fiber optic probe-based optical coherence tomography and Raman spectroscopy imaging system that allows a large field-of-view imaging and detection and grading of cancerous bladder lesions.

A large-aperture and large-angle MEMS-based 2D pointing mirror is presented. The device is electromagnetically actuated by a moving-magnet/stationary-coil pair and potentially suited for high power laser beam shaping and beam pointing applications, such as LIDAR. The 4×4 mm2 mirror, the radially symmetric compliant membrane, and the off-the-shelf permanent magnet are manually assembled, with the planar coil kept at a well-defined vertical distance from the permanent magnet by simple alignment pins. The mirror and the compliant membrane structures are separately microfabricated on bulk silicon and SOI wafers, respectively. The hybrid integration of microfabricated and off-the-shelf components enable low-risk/high-yield fabrication, while limiting the throughput. The device features minimum inter-axis cross coupling and good linearity and is highly immune to alignment and assembly imperfections, thanks to the robust actuation principle. All the components including the bi-axial electromagnetic actuator provide a device footprint as small as the top mirror, allowing the design to be used in compact and high-fill-factor mirror arrays. With a drive coil of 400 mA and 5.12 W drive power, the total uniaxial dc rotation exceeds ±16° (optical) for both axes with good decoupling. At maximum measured angle (biaxial 10° (mechanical)), a position stability better than 0.05° over 7 h, and a position repeatability of 0.04° over 5000 switching cycles is reported. Thermally, the simulated mirror temperature increases to 64 K above the heat sink temperature with a thermal in-flux of 1 kW m−2, under absolute vacuum.