A Feasibility Study of a Novel Piezo MEMS Tweezer for Soft Materials Characterization

Abstract

The opportunity to know the status of a soft tissue (ST) in situ can be very useful for microsurgery or early diagnosis. Since normal and diseased tissues have different mechanical characteristics, many systems have been developed to carry out such measurements locally. Among them, MEMS tweezers are very relevant for their efficiency and relative simplicity compared to the other systems. In this paper a novel piezoelectric MEMS tweezer for soft materials analysis and characterization is presented. A theoretical approach has developed in order to carry out the values of the stiffness, the equivalent Young’s modulus, and the viscous damping coefficients of the analyzed samples. The method has been validated by using both Finite Element Analysis and data from the literature.

Engineering-Aided Inventive Surgery

“…Finally, a significant part of modern surgery relies on pioneering efforts to bring about advances in nano and microengineering to the lab and surgical activities. In this issue, an example of extreme miniaturization of the tools used in surgery has been provided by two papers, one concerning the development of a new piezo MEMS tweezer for soft materials characterization [32] and one describing some reasonable progress of MEMS for operations in a surgical scenario [33].…”

Modal analysis of a four-bar linkage MEMS microgripper with co-operative electrostatic actuation

“…It can be shown that parasitic deformations are minimized when the curved beam elastic weights center is overlapping with the center of the conjugate profiles. The CSFH was adopted in several microdevices, such as in micromanipulators [3], micro mechanisms, grippers [4], microtribometers, etc. These microsystems can be actuated by means of electrostatic actuators, such as linear or rotary comb drives, but the robustness and feasibility of such components in static and as well as dynamic conditions still raises some concerns.…”

An improved fuzzy controller on electromechanical nano-tweezers

“…Nano-tweezers are fundamental manipulators in nano- and biotechnology developed to accurately manipulate and localize objects such as nano-particles, blood cells, and DNA strands (Yang and Xu, 2017). These devices can be operated by using different actuation techniques such as electrostatic (Alneamy et al, 2020; Farrokhabadi et al, 2015), magnetic (Kang and Xu, 2020), piezoelectric (Botta et al, 2019), electrothermal (Solano and Wood, 2007), and optoelectronic (Chiou et al, 2005; Elvira et al, 2018). Although nano-tweezers have been developed in recent years, the use of these vital tools in trapping biological components to study and modify them is still one of the most challenging and motivating interdisciplinary fields (Jiang et al, 2021; Zhang et al, 2021).…”