MEMS Technology - 5% for SL-Charity

Today I want to share some information about my most recent university project. We had to design and simulate a MEMS device. I had written this content a few weeks ago but waited until the evaluation to post. Before talking about my project I'd like to tell you about what is MEMS?

MEMS means Micro-ElectroMechanical Systems. Those systems contain components that are in the Micrometer range which means smaller than the width of human hair. These components can be divided into sensors, actuators, structures, and electronics. You may not know that thousands of MEMS devices are inside your mobile phones and your cars. NEMS is also very important where the components have a Nanometer range. These days World Chip Shortage is one of the main global issues which has a relationship with MEMS and NEMS technology. I will talk about it one day.

The size of a MEMS micro-chain drive compared to a tip of a match.
Source

So, I thought to design a device that can use to detect heavy metals contained in water. Arsenic, Mercury, Cadmium, Lead are known as heavy metals. There is a permissible level for each metal to be dissolved in water. If it passes that limit, that water is not suitable to use. Normally, to measure these metal concentrations, water samples had been sent to laboratories to do tests. So I thought to develop a device to obtain results quickly.

Here I use a kind of electroplating technique to obtain results. Since it is a kind of a complex explanation I'll keep it aside. We can not actually fabricate it in Sri Lanka to validate my concept. So I used Comsol Multiphysics software to simulate the design and it showed good results.

MEMS is not a very mature field yet. People are still doing experiments and looking for new paths. So if someone is interested this is a very good field to explore. Upgrades of hardware you use today will mostly depend on the advancement of this technology.