Avoiding transduction-induced heating in suspended microchannel resonators using piezoelectricity

Calorimetry of single biological entities remains elusive. Suspended microchannel resonators (SMRs) offer excellent performance for real-time detection of various analytes and could hold the key to unlocking pico-calorimetry experiments. However, the typical readout techniques for SMRs are optical-b...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Microsystems & nanoengineering 2021-04, Vol.7 (1), p.34-34, Article 34
Main Authors: Maillard, Damien, De Pastina, Annalisa, Abazari, Amir Musa, Villanueva, Luis Guillermo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/166/987
639/925/927/511
639/925/927/59
Calorimetry
Convection
Convection cooling
Engineering
Flow velocity
Frequency shift
Frequency stability
Heat measurement
Laser cooling
Lasers
Microchannels
Piezoelectricity
Resonance
Resonators
Thermodynamic properties
Vibration meters
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Summary:Calorimetry of single biological entities remains elusive. Suspended microchannel resonators (SMRs) offer excellent performance for real-time detection of various analytes and could hold the key to unlocking pico-calorimetry experiments. However, the typical readout techniques for SMRs are optical-based, and significant heat is dissipated in the sensor, altering the measurement and worsening the frequency noise. In this manuscript, we demonstrate for the first time full on-chip piezoelectric transduction of SMRs on which we focus a laser Doppler vibrometer to analyze its effect. We demonstrate that suddenly applying the laser to a water-filled SMR causes a resonance frequency shift, which we attribute to a local increase in temperature. When the procedure is repeated at increasing flow rates, the resonance frequency shift diminishes, indicating that convection plays an important role in cooling down the device and dissipating the heat induced by the laser. We also show that the frequency stability of the device is degraded by the laser source. In comparison to an optical readout scheme, a low-dissipative transduction method such as piezoelectricity shows greater potential to capture the thermal properties of single entities.
ISSN:2055-7434
2096-1030
2055-7434
DOI:10.1038/s41378-021-00254-1