Texas Tech, U of Utah Win Sandia Microdevice Competition
Released: 6/15/2010 12:20 PM EDT
Source: Sandia National Laboratories
World’s smallest chess set and a microbarbershop win big
Newswise — The world’s smallest chess board — about the diameter of four human hairs — and a pea-sized microbarbershop were winners in this year’s design contest for, respectively, novel and educational microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), held at Sandia National Laboratories in mid May.
The two winning teams will see their designs birthed in Sandia’s microfabrication facility, one of the most advanced in the world.
The micro chess board, created by students at Texas Tech, comes with micropieces scored with the design of traditional chess figures. Each piece is outfitted with even tinier stubs that allow a microrobotic arm to move them from square to square. Space along the side of the board is available to hold captured pieces.
…The high-spirited contest, open to institutional members of the Sandia-led MEMS University Alliance program, provides an arena for the nation’s student engineers to hone their skills in designing and using microdevices. Such devices are used to probe biological cells, arrange and operate components of telecommunications and high-tech machinery and operate many home devices.
The contest helps develop a sense of the maximum and minimum displacement of a micro object, the amount of force needed to move it and the degrees of freedom needed for a part to accomplish its preset task.
The two winning teams will see their designs birthed in Sandia’s microfabrication facility, one of the most advanced in the world.
The micro chess board, created by students at Texas Tech, comes with micropieces scored with the design of traditional chess figures. Each piece is outfitted with even tinier stubs that allow a microrobotic arm to move them from square to square. Space along the side of the board is available to hold captured pieces.
The microbarbershop, intended to service a single hair, employs a microgripper, cutter, moveable mirror and blow dryer designed by students at the University of Utah. “Our device is so small that a single misty drop of an Irish drizzle would swamp the scissors and drown the device,” says team advisor Ian Harvey, a professor of mechanical engineering at the university.
The high-spirited contest, open to institutional members of the Sandia-led MEMS University Alliance program, provides an arena for the nation’s student engineers to hone their skills in designing and using microdevices. Such devices are used to probe biological cells, arrange and operate components of telecommunications and high-tech machinery and operate many home devices.
The contest helps develop a sense of the maximum and minimum displacement of a micro object, the amount of force needed to move it and the degrees of freedom needed for a part to accomplish its preset task.
Texas Tech’s chess board is 435 micrometers by 435 micrometers. (A human hair is about 100 micrometers in diameter.) Each chess piece is approximately 50 micrometers, or half the width of a human hair. The design integrates bidirectional linear drives that enable the movement of pieces longitudinally, a positioning stage with two degrees of freedom and, apparently, the world’s smallest chess board.
The University of Utah’s microbarbershop consists of a microgripper that reaches off the chip to grasp a human hair and holds it in front of an off-chip deployed microbuzzsaw to be cut. Both microtools, driven by a ratcheting actuator, will be observed at a video-enabled station and portrayed on a large video monitor as they move and cut a human hair. Also included are a moveable micromirror, an off-chip micro hair dryer and an off-chip single-hair “teaser” to complete the playful notion of a barbershop and convey an intuitive sense of relative scale for these tiny machines.
Contributing to Texas Tech’s success were Sahil Oak, Sandesh Rawool, Ganapathy Sivakumar and Ashwin Vijayasai, says team advisor and electrical engineering professor Tim Dallas.
Full press release is available here.
Congrats!