A Novel Technique for Mass Detection of A Piezoelectric Cantilever Using Active Bifurcations

Most current vibration-based chemical sensors and biosensors use the sensors resonance frequency change to quantify the small mass of chemical and biological agents attached to the surface of the sensors. In contrast, this paper proposes a novel technique for mass detection of a piezoelectric cantilever by actively triggering the bifurcation behavior. The cantilever is forced to bifurcate and exhibit complex dynamics (e.g., chaos) by using a nonlinear feedback excitation. Meanwhile, a feedback loop is constructed by measuring the voltage from a piezoelectric sensor, by processing the signal, and then by applying the voltage to a piezoelectric actuator. Due to the high sensitivity of a chaotic system to small parametric variations, the morphing of the attractor of the dynamic response of the piezoelectric cantilever can be utilized as an indicator to detect a small amount of mass and its location. The numerical investigation in this paper provides a basis to develop the next generation of high sensitivity vibration-based mass detection sensors.