Micromechanics Research Group

Our research falls into the following three broad areas:

Micromechanical devices: This includes the development of; sub-millimetre micromotors and microactuators; microengineered fluid handling devices; development and integration of a minimally invasive microdevices for medical and industrial applications; shape memory alloy thin film microactuators and microsensors; micro- and macro-compliant manipulators for micro-positioning; biological MEMS devices for living cell studies; nanomechanical measurement of biological tissues; and bio-mechanical-MEMS, applied, for example, to new sensing and actuation materials development and novel mechanical detection of biomarkers for rapid disease diagnostics and drug screening.

Stress wave engineering: The work is essentially in passive and active ultrasound. Passive ultrasound involves the application of Acoustic Emission to management and monitoring of manufacturing processes, structural integrity and engines and other types of rotating and reciprocating machines. Opportunities also exist in active ultrasound, for example, using surface acoustic waves to move, pump, mix and evaporate microdroplets for digital microfluidics applications. Surface acoustic wave technology is also being developed for advanced sensing and bio-detection systems.

Surface mechanics and surface engineering: The research work is focusing on mechanical, tribological and functional properties of thin films and surface coatings in the conventional and micro-devices as well as microstructure-processing-performance relationships for the advanced thin films and coatings. The main focused research topics include: mapping the failure modes and mechanisms in high stress corrosive/erosive environments; tribological modelling to improve the design of the coating substrate system. More recent work includes micromechanics of thin films and surface coatings, microactuators based on piezoelectric ZnO, AlN and PZT thin films and shape-memory alloy (SMA) films.