The increasing interest for light and movable electronic systems, cell phones and small digital devices, drives the technological research toward integrated regenerating power sources with small dimensions and great autonomy. Conventional batteries are already unable to deliver power in more and more shrunk volumes maintaining the requirements of long duration and lightweight. A possible solution to overcome these limits is the use of miniaturized fuel cell. The fuel cell offers a greater gravimetric energy density compared to conventional batteries. The micromachining technology of silicon is an important tool to reduce the fuel cell structure to micrometer sizes. The use of silicon also gives the opportunity
to integrate the power source and the electronic circuits controlling the fuel cell on the same structure. This paper reports preliminary results concerning the micromachining procedure to fabricate an arrays of microchannels for a Si-based electrocatalytic membrane for miniaturized Si-based proton exchange membrane fuel cells. Several techniques are routinely used to fabricate arrays of microchannels embedded in crystalline silicon. In this paper we present an
innovative microchannel formation process, entirely based on surface silicon micromachining, which allows us to produce rhomboidal microchannels embedded on (100) silicon wafers. Compared to the traditional techniques, the proposed process is extremely compatible with the standard microelectronics silicon technology. The kinetics of rhomboidal microchannel formation is monitored by cyclic voltammetry measurements and the results are compared with a detailed structural characterisation performed by scanning electron microscopy. The effectiveness of this process is discussed in view of the possible applications in the fuel cell application.
Biosensors are a very useful tool to produce drugs or to monitor chemical species through their product of reaction. The sensor is fabricated bounding on its surface specific enzymes that can accomplish the synthesis function. We studied the possibility to fabricate Si-based micro-biosensors to detect glucose in water solutions using porous Si (PS) as surface to bound the specific enzyme. We ideated and fabricated a novel biosensor structure based on a PS membrane that can be used for glucose monitoring and for drug production, by properly choosing the enzyme to immobilize in the reactor. The fabrication details of the structure, having a suspended and auto-supporting PS membrane, through surface micromachining processes, ULSI compatible, are shown. Micro channels localised below the membrane will allow the buffer solution flow through the porous matrix. Moreover, in this work we acquired the know-how on the enzyme manipulation, bonding and detection on Si-based surfaces. The enzyme that accomplish the synthesis function is the glucose oxidase. We deposited it on different substrates: PS, bulk Si and on glass. On these samples photoluminescence, absorbance and optical microscopy measurements were performed.
Biosensors are a very useful tool to produce drugs or to monitor chemical species through their product of reaction. The sensor is fabricated bounding on its surface specific enzymes that can accomplish the synthesis function. We studied the possibility to fabricate Si-based micro-biosensors to detect glucose in water solutions. We used porous Si (PS) as surface to bound the glucose oxidase enzyme. We ideated an fabricated a novel biosensor structure based on a PS membrane that can be used for glucose monitoring and for drug production, by properly choosing the enzyme to immobilize in the reactor. The fabrication details of the structure, having a suspended and auto-supporting PS membrane, through surface micromachining processes, ULSI compatible, are shown. Micro channels localised below the membrane will allow the buffer solution flow through the porous matrix. Moreover, in this work we acquired the know-how on the enzyme manipulation, bonding and detection on Si-based surfaces. The glucose oxidase was deposited in PS, on bulk Si and on glass to perform photoluminescence, absorbance and optical microscopy measurements.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.