Modeling of mechanical resonators used for nanocrystalline materials characterization and disease diagnosis of HIVs

The modeling and performance of mechanical resonators used for mass detection of bio-cells, nanocrystalline materials characterization, and disease diagnosis of human immune-viruses (HIVs) are investigated. To simulate the real behavior of these mechanical resonators, a novel distributed-parameter model based on Euler-Bernoulli beam theory is developed. This model is equipped with a micromechanical model and an atomic lattice model to capture the inhomogeneity nature of the material microstructure. Compared with lumped-parameter model predictions, the results show that this developed model best fits with the real behavior of the mechanical resonators when detecting the mass of vaccinia virus. In terms of material characterization, the developed model gives very good estimations for the densities and Young’s moduli of the grain boundary of both the nanocrystalline silicon and nanocrystalline diamond. For disease diagnosis, it is shown that the number of human immune-deficiency virus particles in a liquid sample can be easily detected when using the proposed model. The results also show that the developed model is beneficial and can be used to design mechanical resonators made of nanocrystalline materials with the ability to control the resonators’ sizes and the material structure.

Microsyst Technol DOI 10.1007/s00542-015-2421-y