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

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Fabio Botta, Andrea Rossi, Nicola Pio Belfiore
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2019-06-01
Series:Applied Sciences
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/9/11/2277
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:2076-3417