AE's Naraghi Takes First for Second Year in Sandia Lab Contest

4/10/2013 Written by Susan Mumm

Ph.D. candidate Mohammad Naraghi, under the direction of Professor Ioannis Chasiotis, has taken a first place at Sandia National Laboratory's University Alliance competition for the second consecutive year!

Written by Written by Susan Mumm

Ph.D. candidate Mohammad Naraghi, under the direction of Professor Ioannis Chasiotis, has taken a first place at Sandia National Laboratory's University Alliance competition for the second consecutive year!

Naraghi took first at Sandia's fourth annual competition for student microelectromechanical systems designs. His design fit the category calling for a micro design to reliably inspect nanoscale phenomena. The Illinois device featured a mechanical testing platform specifically designed to perform creep/stress relaxation tests on soft polymeric and biological nanostructures. The device incorporated a piezoresistive loadcell with a novel on-chip actuator capable of generating large deformations on the sample.

The University Alliance competition gives universities around the country an opportunity to test their skills in developing all the intricate details of design, analysis, and fabrication of complex MEMS devices, says Mark Platzbecker, technical team lead in Sandia's MEMS Core Technologies Department.

The work conducted at UIUC was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under NSF-NIRT grant DMI-0532320.


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This story was published April 10, 2013.