POTENTIAL MEMS APPLICATIONS IN CIVIL ENGINEERING

摘要

Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) are devices created by silicon wafer fabrication with mechanical transducers or actuators formed integrally with the electronics for information processing. These devices contain features at micron scale, with a correspondingly small overall device size. Such devices possess a wide variety of technological capabilities, and they can be produced with the economies of silicon fabrication. For example, MEMS accelerometers may realistically be available at a unit cost 1/1000 that of any mechanical accelerometer, suggesting that structures may be fitted with hundreds or thousands of monitoring stations. In this paper, we first outline the processes used for fabrication of MEMS devices, followed by an overview of well-established MEMS products and their current uses. We describe prominent working examples of MEMS devices in industrial applications (such as automotive, office equipment, laboratory equipment, aeronautics, and so on) in order to acquaint the reader with their capabilities. We then discuss their potential use in civil engineering, suggesting examples for application to structures and construction, environmental monitoring and remediation, and transportation or infrastructure system operation and maintenance. The most obvious civil engineering applications are ones which would take advantage of this opportunity for greatly expanded sensing; many civil engineering activities have historically been data-poor, or in some cases totally blind. MEMS technologies can fundamentally alter these projects to be data-rich. We comment on additional MEMS technology demands (for remote power sources, communication capabilities, etc.) that will be generated by these anticipated civil engineering applications. MEMS technologies themselves are at an early stage in their evolution, and future developments are likely to expand any current vision by orders of magnitude, but they already present the opportunity to change fundamentally the way in which major civil engineering challenges are met.