CPA-DA: Hierarchical Design Tools for Bio-NEMS

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Proposal Number: 0810294 Title: CPA-DA: Hierarchical Design Tools for Bio-NEMS Principal Investigator: N. R. Aluru Institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Abstract Polymers are attractive materials for nanoelectromechanical (NEMS) as they can respond to various stimuli such as pH, salt concentration, electric field, etc. Polymers are easy to manufacture, cheap, disposable, biocompatible, low-power actuators and exhibit attractive sensitivity and selectivity properties. Polymer-based NEMS find applications in sensing cells, proteins, DNA and biomolecules, and as key components in microfluidic networks with applications in chemical and biological analysis. Polymer-based bio-NEMS devices when combined with microfluidics, MEMS, and control electronics can enable significant advances in the design and development of integrated systems. The objective of this proposal is to develop hierarchical design tools to enable rapid design and development of bio-NEMS. The proposed research focuses on performing quantum-mechanical studies to understand the electrostatic behavior of polymers, atomistic simulations to understand diffusion in polymers and to extract stress-strain relations characterizing the constitutive behavior of the biomaterials, continuum calculations based on coupled chemical, electrical, and mechanical theories to understand the macroscopic response, and extracting compact models for bio-NEMS devices from detailed and extensive continuum simulations. The research proposed here is multidisciplinary and some of the applications that could benefit from this research are nanoscale sensing and actuation, DNA purification, chemical and biological processing, etc. This project will result in the education of graduate students in the highly interdisciplinary area of bio-NEMS. Students working on this project will be trained in quantum, atomistic and continuum simulation methods, physics of polymers, system-level modeling and design of large scale integrated bio-NEMS systems. The results from this project will be presented in archival journals and conferences around the world. In addition, the results from this project will be integrated into an existing course on modeling and simulation of MEMS and summer schools offered at UIUC.