Week 5

Hello dear readers! Welcome back to the penultimate blog post of my Senior Project. This blog will be a quick rundown of my last time going into the lab this past Wednesday and the crazy changes to the results of my project that followed.

This was an especially important meeting with my advisors, because it was my opportunity to present all my findings from the last few weeks of research to Dr. Fabio and Dr. Grbovic and receive their feedback. As I mentioned in my last blog post, my hope was that their experience with MEMS Acoustic Detectors would allow them to see something I had missed and help me finally get the rocker to work. 

As I presented my spreadsheet of data, which included tables depicting how changing every single parameter would affect the resonant frequency band and directionality, Dr. Grbovic and Dr. Fabio came to the same conclusion I did. The rocker as an engineering design could not work as a sine-aligned acoustic sensor. The consistent asymmetry present across every single directionality study was proof of this fact. Even my out-of-the-box ideas, like using multiple materials or creating an asymmetric rocker with two halves that have legs of differing dimensions, did not succeed in making the directionality graphs symmetric. 

This result was somewhat disappointing. I had spent two months of my life and hundreds of hours of work developing this piece of technology, only to eventually determine after lots of testing that it could not work in its current form.

However, in that moment of disappointment, Dr. Fabio noticed something interesting about my directionality graphs. Within the rocker’s directionality graphs, there was a range between -50 degrees and 100 degrees of continuous unambiguous growth of amplitude. Although this was irrelevant to the effectiveness of the coupled bender-rocker acoustic sensor I had been working on, this was a beneficial result to the development of a directional acoustic sensor that could be used for other applications that did not require 360 degrees of range, such as the development of hearing aids. 

This was a surprising result to not only me but also my advisors, and they urged me to look over all my data to work towards a new goal. Instead of trying to create sine-like directionality, my goal was now the opposite: to maximize the asymmetry of the rocker’s directionality instead of minimizing it. After getting home from the lab, I analyzed all my data and, using everything I had learned about every parameter from my research, I ran a simulation that showed a whopping 165 degree range of effectiveness. 

This was a noteworthy achievement that left me surprised. I do not yet know how my findings will be used by Dr. Grbovic and Dr. Fabio, but it is entirely possible that my findings could be used to send a line of rocker-inspired MEMS Directional Acoustic Detector chips into production.

Thank You for reading this blog post! Come back and read my last blog post, which I will write later today, that will explain everything I learned about research from my project and my general takeaways from this experience.