A. James Clark School of Engineering
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1654
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Simplified Reflection Fabry-Perot Method for Determination of Electro-Optic Coefficients of Poled Polymer Thin Films(MDPI, 2011-08-18) Park, Dong Hun; Luo, Jingdong; Jen, Alex K.-Y.; Herman, Warren N.We report a simplified reflection mode Fabry-Perot interferometry method for determination of electro-optic (EO) coefficients of poled polymer thin films. Rather than fitting the detailed shape of the Fabry-Perot resonance curve, our simplification involves a technique to experimentally determine the voltage-induced shift in the angular position of the resonance minimum. Rigorous analysis based on optical properties of individual layers of the multilayer structure is not necessary in the data analysis. Although angle scans are involved, the experimental setup does not require a θ-2θ rotation stage and the simplified analysis is an advantage for polymer synthetic efforts requiring quick and reliable screening of new materials. Numerical and experimental results show that our proposed method can determine EO coefficients to within an error of ∼8% if poled values for the refractive indices are used.Item Polymer Based Miniature Fabry-Perot Pressure Sensors with Temperature Compensation: Modeling, Fabrication, and Experimental studies(2013) Bae, Hyungdae; Yu, Miao; Mechanical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Miniature Fabry-Perot (FP) pressure sensors have been of great interest because of their advantages of small sizes, high performance, and immunity to electromagnetic interference. Most of these sensors are built with silicon/silica materials that have good mechanical, chemical, and thermal stabilities. However, due to the large Young's modulus of silica/silicon, developing a high sensitivity miniature sensor becomes difficult. In addition, fabrication of these sensors often involves high temperature fusion bonding and harsh acid etching. On the other hand, a polymer material becomes an attractive choice for high sensitive and miniature pressure sensors due to its small Young's modulus relative to that of silicon/glass. Moreover, polymer processes can be performed under ambient pressure and temperature without hazardous chemicals. However, a polymer-based sensor suffers from high temperature sensitivity, which must be compensated to obtain accurate pressure measurements. In this dissertation, three types of polymer based FP miniature sensors for static or quasi-static pressure measurements are investigated through modeling, microfabrication, and experiments. First, co-axial and cross-axial FP sensors with a built-in fiber Bragg grating (FBG) for temperature measurement and compensation are studied. In both sensors, the FP cavity is precisely self-aligned with the optical axis by using the fiber as a natural mask, which eliminates the need for a photo mask and tedious optical alignments. Second, a FP sensor composed of a UV-molded optical cavity with a pre-written FBG is developed. For the first time, a UV molding process with an optical fiber based mold is developed for fabrication of miniature FP sensors. This process enables high accuracy optical alignment for UV molding. Taking advantage of the UV molding process, the third type of sensor features a hybrid dual FP cavity for simultaneous temperature and pressure measurements. A novel signal processing method is developed to retrieve the multiple cavity lengths with an improved speed, resolution, and noise resistance. Experimental studies show that these polymer based sensors have good pressure and temperature sensing performance as well as temperature compensation capabilities. In addition, blood pressure and intradiscal pressure measurements of a swine are performed, which demonstrates the feasibility of these sensors for biomedical applications.Item MINIATURE LOW-COHERENCE FIBER OPTIC ACOUSTIC SENSOR WITH THIN-FILM UV POLYMER DIAPHRAGM(2012) Stief, Felix; Yu, Miao; Mechanical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A miniature low-coherence fiber optic acoustic sensor with a thin-film UV polymer diaphragm is developed and studied in this thesis to address the fundamental challenge of miniaturizing acoustic sensors. When miniaturizing an acoustic sensor, there is a critical size limitation at which the transduction mechanism deformation becomes too small for detection. However, a solution to this problem is to utilize a high resolution, low coherence fiber optic interferometric detection system coupled with a soft, thin-film transduction mechanism. A novel fabrication technique was developed to enable the use of elastomers, which inherently exhibit desirably low Young's modulus properties. In addition, the fabrication process enables fabrication of diaphragms at thicknesses on the order of nanometers. The fabrication process also renders highly tunable sensor performance and superior sensing quality at a low cost. The sensor developed exhibits a flat frequency response between 50 Hz and 4 kHz with a useable bandwidth up to 20 kHz, a dynamic range of 117.55 dB SPL, a signal to noise ratio (SNR) of 58 dB, and a sensitivity up to 1200 mV/Pa. In this thesis, it is further demonstrated that by using an array these sensors fabricated from the same batch facilitates accurate directional sound localization by utilizing the interaural phase difference (IPD) exhibited by sensor pairs. Future work is suggested to optimize the sensor performance for a specific application, to carry out studies of more complex array configurations, and to develop algorithms that can help increase the sound localization accuracy.