By Christine Long

The National Science Foundation awarded a pair of engineering professors at The University of Toledo a $175,000 grant to design a program to manufacture micro-electro-mechanical systems on the Internet.

Micro-electro-mechanical systems, called MEMS, have tiny moving parts and are used in cell phones, vehicle airbags and other consumer electronic products. For example, these devices are what cause the screen on a tablet or smartphone to rotate automatically from portrait view to landscape.

Dr. Vijaya Kumar Devabhaktuni, professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Dr. Daniel Georgiev, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, will lead the project titled “CloudMEMS: Cybermanufacturing of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems” to develop a web-based, low-cost program to design micro-electro-mechanical systems, which will allow entrepreneurs and researchers to more efficiently prototype their designs.

Devabhaktuni and Georgiev will collaborate on this project with Norfolk State University and the University of Dayton researchers who have been awarded $100,000 and $225,000. Overall, the National Science Foundation invested a total of $500,000 in this collaborative project.

According to the award, “The CloudMEMS platform will be made accessible via the Internet to bridge the cyber and manufacturing domains, thereby promoting leadership in the U.S. in cyber-driven microsystems and manufacturing.”

This three-year grant is one of five UT research projects to recently receive federal funds from the National Science Foundation totaling $375,000 in the fields of cybersecurity, advanced materials manufacturing, smart grid technology and three-dimensional cell culture.

“These funds will allow the top researchers at The University of Toledo to focus on developing breakthrough discoveries that will likely spur private-sector economic growth from new products and services for the automotive and aerospace sectors, cybersecurity and agriculture,” Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur said. “There are exciting things happening at The University of Toledo.”