We report the design of the KRISS watt balance, which includes a magnet, a guiding stage and a coil position measurement system. The KRISS watt balance incorporates a closed-type cylindrical permanent magnet and a motion guiding stage. For the magnet, a flux shunt is used to reduce flux changes due to temperature variations. A piston gauge is used to achieve linearity in the motion guiding stage. In the weighing mode, the residual force between the weight of the test mass and the Lorentz force generated in a coil is measured by a commercial weighing cell. In the dynamic mode, a linear motor in the motion guiding stage vertically translates the coil and the weighing cell. The in-plane motion of the coil is measured by position sensors, and the out-of-plane motion is measured by single-pass homodyne interferometers.

Liquid metals are one of the most interesting and promising materials due to their electrical, fluidic, and thermophysical properties. With the aid of their exceptional deformable natures, liquid metals are now considered to be electrically conductive materials for sensors and actuators, major constituent transducers in soft robotics, that can experience and withstand significant levels of mechanical deformation. For the upcoming era of wearable electronics and soft robotics, we would like to offer an up-to-date overview of liquid metal-based soft (thus significantly deformable) sensors mainly but not limited to researchers in relevant fields. This paper will thoroughly highlight and critically review recent literature on design, fabrication, characterization, and application of liquid metal devices and suggest scientific and engineering routes towards liquid metal sensing devices of tomorrow.

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To establish of standard technique of nanolength measurement in a two-dimensional plane, a new ͑AFM͒ system has been designed. In this system, measurement uncertainty is dominantly affected by the Abbe error of the XYZ scanning stage. No linear stage is perfectly straight; in other words, every scanning stage is subject to tilting, pitch, and yaw motion. In this article, an AFM system with minimum offset of XYZ sensing is designed. And, the XYZ scanning stage is designed to minimize the rotation angle because Abbe errors occur through the multiply of offset and rotation angle. For XY stage, optimal design is performed to minimize the rotation angle by maximizing the stiffness ratio of motion direction to the parasitic motion direction of each stage. For the Z stage, the optimal design of maximizing the first-resonant frequency is performed. When the resonant frequency increases, the scan speed is improved, thereby reducing errors caused by sensor drift. This article describes the procedures of selecting parameters for the optimal design. The full range of the XYZ scanner is 100 m ϫ 100 m ϫ 10 m. Based on the solution of the optimization problem, the XYZ scanner is fabricated. And tilting, pitch, and yaw motion are measured by autocollimator to evaluate the performance of XY stage.

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