In order to fully benefit from the functionalities of flexible endoscopes in surgery a simple shaft-guide that can be used to support the flexible endoscope shaft is required. Such a shaft-guide must be flexible during insertion into the human body and rigidified when properly positioned to support the flexible endoscope shaft. A shaft-guide called 'Vacu-SL' was designed, consisting of a foil tube, filled with particles, that is rigidified by creating a vacuum in its tube. It is expected that the bending stiffness of a loaded, rigidified Vacu-SL shaft-guide is significantly influenced by the shape, hardness and size of the filler particles used. The goal of this study was to find the relations between the filler particles' size, shape and hardness and a rigidified Vacu-SL shaft-guide's bending stiffness. Vacu-SL test models were made using polystyrene, acrylic glass, glass, steel, and corundum particles as spheres, pebbles and granulate, with average diameters between 0.16-1.7 mm. These test models were rigidified and then loaded in a tensile tester. The forces needed for 5 and 10 mm deflections of the rigidified test models were measured. The results show that particle size, shape and hardness all influence a rigidified Vacu-SL shaft-guide's bending stiffness. Size and hardness showed an optimum and granules performed better than spheres. Although the maximally measured bending stiffness might be insufficient to enable proper guidance of flexible endoscope shafts, the results suggest several ways to successfully improve the Vacu-SL shaft-guide.

This paper presents an eddy-current sensor (ECS) interface intended for sub-nanometer displacement sensing in hitech applications. The interface employs a 126 MHz excitation frequency to mitigate the skin-effect, and achieve high resolution and stability. An efficient on-chip sensor-offset compensation scheme is introduced which removes sensor-offset proportional to the standoff distance. To assist in the ratiometric suppression of noise and drift of the excitation-oscillator, the ECS interface consists of a highly linear amplitude-demodulation scheme that employs passive capacitors for voltage-to-current conversion. Using a PCB-based pseudo-differential ECS, stability tests were performed which demonstrated a thermal drift of < 7.3 nm/ • C and long-term drift of only 29.5 nm over a period of 60 hours. The interface achieves an effective noise floor of 13.4 pm/ √ Hz which corresponds to a displacement resolution of 0.6 nm in a 2 kHz noise-bandwidth. The ECS interface is fabricated in TSMC 0.18 µm CMOS technology and dissipates only 19.8 mW from a 1.8 V supply.

Commercially available gravimeters and seismometers can be used for measuring Earth's acceleration at resolution levels in the order of ng= ffiffiffiffiffiffi Hz p (where g represents earth's gravity) but they are typically high-cost and bulky. In this work the design of a bulk micromachined MEMS device exploiting non-linear buckling behaviour is described, aiming for ng= ffiffiffiffiffiffi Hz p resolution by maximising mechanical and capacitive sensitivity. High mechanical sensitivity is obtained through low structural stiffness. Near-zero stiffness is achieved through geometric design and large deformation into a region where the mechanism is statically balanced or neutrally stable. Moreover, the device has an integrated capacitive comb transducer and makes use of a high-resolution impedance readout ASIC. The sensitivity from displacement to a change in capacitance was maximised within the design and process boundaries given, by making use of a trench isolation technique and exploiting the large-displacement behaviour of the device. The measurement results demonstrate that the resonance frequency can be tuned from 8.7 Hz-18.7 Hz, depending on the process parameters and the tilt of the device. In this system, which combines an integrated capacitive transducer with a sensitivity of 2.55 aF/nm and an impedance readout chip, the theoretically achievable system resolution equals 17.02 ng= ffiffiffiffiffiffi Hz p. The small size of the device and the use of integrated readout electronics allow for a wide range of practical applications for data collection aimed at the internet of things.

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