Current technologies capable of establishing bioresorbable orthopedic fixation devices and stents have broad utility for biomedical applications to improve constructive tissue remodeling. Recent studies and investigations on bioresorbable conductors, semiconductors, dielectrics, and polymer substrates offer a promising opportunity to propel the existing non-degradable bioelectronic devices to the promising bioresorbable electronics,...
Lubrication is the most means for sliding interface failure prevention because it helps separate two interacting surfaces, reduce asperity contacts and thus extend the working life of the parts. Improving the tribological performance of lubricated interfaces is a challenging work, as several influence factors are involved, such as coating, plasticity,...
Hollow biopsy needles are widely adopted medical devices for the removal of biological tissue to better identify a lesion or an abnormality observed through a physical exam or a radiology scan. These procedures can provide significantly more information than most medical tests, and they are usually performed on dermis layers,...
Global energy demand is increasingly rapidly in today’s modern world with increasing living standards all around the world. As global energy demand rises, energy efficiency has never been more crucial and that the improvement of tribological systems is critical to the progress of the global future. A large part of...
In recent years, we have seen the embryo of Industry 4.0 which has been promoting manufacturing processes towards the future with better efficiency, higher accuracy and better reliability. However, manufacturing precision has been restricted by the precision of metrology and material characterization. In other words, one can only manufacture parts...
Polymer nanocomposites have attracted great interest in recent years because of their potential as tailored materials with enhanced properties. Recent experiments have shown that polymer nanocomposites are able to achieve significant improvement in dielectrical, thermal, mechanical and other physical properties compared with their parent polymer systems. More importantly, these outstanding...
Muscle strength assessment is a standard part of any clinical evaluation. Due to the kinematic and muscular redundancy in the human musculoskeletal system, muscle strength can not be measured directly in vivo. Clinicians utilize specific postures and forces to bias the muscles of interest, then infer the muscle strength from...
Polymer nanocomposites are a class of advanced materials comprised of soft polymer matrix and nano-filler inclusions. While it has been found qualitatively that enhancements of material properties could be achieved by dispersing inorganic nano-particles into organic polymer matrix, the intrinsic governing principles of such composite has not been thoroughly studied...
High performance polymers and their composites have wide ranging application in advanced and emerging material systems. The macroscale performance of these advanced materials is often defined by interfaces that induce nanoscale changes in the microstructure or molecular conformations (termed the ‘interphase’) of the polymer. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is an...
Predicting pediatric spinal deformity (PSD) from X-ray images collected on the patient's initial visit is a challenging task. This research provides a bio-informed framework based on a mechanistic machine learning technique with dynamic patient-specific (PS) parameters to predict PSD. We provide a geometry-based bone growth model that can be utilized...
As the technology enabling touch-sense rendering of virtual textures grows in efficacy and prevalence, so too grows the need for a standardized means of storing, transferring, and reconstituting textural signals. Furthermore, to achieve the ultra-low-latency requirements of the next generation of global communications networks, this digital texture representation must be...
Polymer nanocomposites are a designer class of materials where nanoscale particles, functional chemistry and polymer matrix combine to yield unprecedented combinations of superior physical properties. While well-defined data representation and quantitative models have been developed in material science domains such as metallic alloys, polymer nanocomposites have remained a largely untouched...
Active lateral force feedback is essential for haptic applications in which forces on the fingertip is perpendicular to or in the same direction of finger movement, such as virtual shape rendering and button click rendering. In this thesis, I first present a novel device, the UltraShiver, that can provide large...
Additive manufacturing (AM), also known as three-dimensional (3D) printing, has received considerable interests in recent years. It enables fabrication of complex, customizable parts that would otherwise be too expensive or impossible for traditional manufacturing methods. 3D printing encompasses a wide variety of processes, including photopolymerization, material extrusion, selective laser sintering,...
The functions of lubricants in moving interfaces are extensive; lubricants minimize friction, transfer heat, clean the rubbing surfaces, extract debris, and diminish wear. Rather than using separate lubricants for each of the functions, it is more desirable to make one lubricant serve multiple purposes, or a muti-functional lubricant. The goals...
The rapid development of flexible electronics enables a huge amount of bio-integrated applications with advantages of the mechanical compliance, stretchability and comformability of the devices. My dissertation further advances this area by a series of projects, which include designing and optimizing novel compliant structures, proposing novel elastomer encapsulation process for...
Additive manufacturing (AM) offers exciting advantages for the fabrication of metallic parts compared to traditional techniques, such as the ability to create complex geometries with less material waste. This is done by building arbitrary geometries in a layer-by-layer fashion, thereby giving the designer great control over the design of the...
Mixing by cutting-and-shuffling (like that for a deck of cards or a Rubik's cube) is a paradigm that has not been studied in detail even though it can be applied in a variety of situations including the mixing of granular materials. Mathematically, cutting- and-shuffling is described by piecewise isometries (PWIs),...
In recent years Additive Manufacturing (also known as 3D printing) processes have risen in use within research and industry to create complex, custom parts, which would be otherwise too expensive or even impossible to fabricate via conventional manufacturing methods. While originated as a tool for rapid prototyping, the improvements in...
Nanoelectromechanical (NEMS) systems fabricated using atomically-thin materials have low mass and high stiffness and are thus ideal candidates for force and mass sensing applications. Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) offer certain unique properties in their few-layered form – such as piezoelectricity and a direct band gap in some cases – and...