Seminario Belfiore 2/2
Channel: Unicas - Ingegneria
Date: 21/05/2016

Micro- and Nano- Technology exhibits a great impact on many applications, such as, for example,
biology, micro- and nano- medicine, nano-toxicology, electronics, aerospace and material science.
At the micro scale, Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS) are made up of components
between 1 m to 200 m in size, while the full device ranges in size from 20 m to 2 mm. Each
device embeds a central unit that processes data (the microprocessor) and one or more mechanical
components that interact with the surroundings such as, for example, microsensors, microactuators
or, more recently, micro-robots.
At these size scales, the standard paradigm of classical mechanical design is not always useful. For
example, in MEMS, surface effects, such as electrostatics and wetting, dominate over volume
effects, such as inertia or thermal mass, because surface-to-volume ratio is very large. Furthermore,
due to technological limitations, most of the actual MEMS-Technology based devices have just one
or two Degrees of Freedom (DoF) and, rarely, they embed revolute joints. This Seminar reveals a
new strategy to synthetize multi-DoF multi-hinge MEMS for an assigned specific task.