Abstract
A microcantilever is a suspended micro-scale beam structure supported at one end which can bend and/or vibrate when subjected to a load. Microcantilevers are one of the most fundamental miniaturized devices used in microelectromechanical systems and are ubiquitous in sensing, imaging, time reference, and biological/biomedical applications. They are typically built using micro and nanofabrication techniques derived from the microelectronics industry and can involve microelectronics-related materials, polymeric materials, and biological materials. This work presents a comprehensive review of the rich dynamical response of a microcantilever and how it has been used for measuring the mass and rheological properties of Newtonian/non-Newtonian fluids in real time, in ever-decreasing space and time scales, and with unprecedented resolution.
Highlights
Fluids play a key role in many sensing applications based on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), being either the substance to be tested or the support environment used to keep the substance of interest in its native or physiological state
This paper presents a thorough review of how the complex dynamical response of the microcantilever excited by a periodic force and interacting with the surrounding environment can be used for mass and rheological sensing
Sensors 2021, 21, 115 used to excite the dynamical response of the probe, including open and closed-loop schemes typically found in sensing applications
Summary
Fluids play a key role in many sensing applications based on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), being either the substance to be tested (when measuring rheological properties) or the support environment used to keep the substance of interest in its native or physiological state (when detecting proteins, DNA, or other analytes in a solution). The understanding of the interaction of the sensor with the surrounding medium is a key topic in the process of measuring the mass of analytes with extremely high—potentially single-molecule—accuracy, and when using MEMS sensors to study the rheology of simple and complex fluids. Such wide sensing applications span the fields of the food and process industry, environmental monitoring, healthcare, microfluidics, and others. A thorough discussion of noise currently being developed and studied to improve the performance of microcantilevermeasurements and mechanisms follows This aspect is often overlooked in the literature, based sensors.
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