A single magnetic nanocomposite cilia force sensor

Alfadhel, Ahmed; Khan, Mohammed Asadullah; Cardoso, Susana; Kosel, Jürgen

A single magnetic nanocomposite cilia force sensor

Files

RESUBMISSION_SAS_2016_Alfadhel_Jurgen.pdf (1.11 MB)

Type

Conference Paper

Authors

Alfadhel, Ahmed

Khan, Mohammed Asadullah

Cardoso, Susana
Kosel, Jürgen

KAUST Department

Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) Division
Electrical Engineering Program

Online Publication Date

2016-05-30

Print Publication Date

2016-04

Date

2016-05-30

Abstract

The advancements in fields like robotics and medicine continuously require improvements of sensor devices and more engagement of cooperative sensing technologies. For example, instruments such as tweezers with sensitive force sensory heads could provide the ability to sense a variety of physical quantities in real time, such as the amount and direction of the force applied or the texture of the gripped object. Force sensors with such abilities could be great solutions toward the development of smart surgical tools. In this work, a unique force sensor that can be integrated at the tips of robotic arms or surgical tools is reported. The force sensor consists of a single bioinspired, permanent magnetic and highly elastic nanocomposite cilia integrated on a magnetic field sensing element. The nanocomposite is prepared from permanent magnetic nanowires incorporated into the highly elastic polydimethylsiloxane. We demonstrate the potential of this concept by performing several experiments to show the performance of the force sensor. The developed sensor element has a 200 μm in diameter single cilium with 1:5 aspect ratio and shows a detection range up to 1 mN with a sensitivity of 1.6 Ω/mN and a resolution of 31 μN. The simple fabrication process of the sensor allows easy optimization of the sensor performance to meet the needs of different applications.

Citation

Alfadhel, A., Khan, M. A., Cardoso, S., & Kosel, J. (2016). A single magnetic nanocomposite cilia force sensor. 2016 IEEE Sensors Applications Symposium (SAS). doi:10.1109/sas.2016.7479828

Acknowledgements

Research reported in this publication was supported by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).