Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

The goal of my proposed research program is to study, design, implement, and test innovative advanced electronic microsystems for biomedical and oilfield applications, develop patent applications around them, and commercialize them as soon as these ideas mature enough to reach industrial applicability. My plan in the next 5 years is to research, develop and test two innovative electronic microsystems, the In Situ Lab Aid (ISLA), a new wristwatch-like device for painless, wireless, single-use blood analysis for early breast cancer screening; and a miniaturized, self-calibrating, mobile inertial microsystem for downhole navigation in lateral drilling from existing unproductive oil wells. The idea behind ISLA is quite innovative: after a blood sample is extracted with an in-plane MEMS actuator based on shape memory alloys (SMA), it is subjected to an immediate, intermittent interrogation in situ by a miniature high-intensity super-luminescent light emitting diode and the resulting fluorescence is recorded until the blood sample coagulates completely. The hypothesis is that these fluorescence data will be extremely useful for the early diagnosis of breast cancer. A recent (2015) study on blood fluorescence spectroscopy for breast cancer screening revealed the sensitivity and specificity of this approach to be 80.4% and 100%, respectively. Having a minimally-invasive, wrist-watch like device to perform this blood fluorescence test in situ will be a tremendous advancement in early breast cancer detection. In the area of inertial navigation in downhole oil and gas exploration, we recently suggested a radical new error-reducing approach using an innovative method called "In-Drilling Alignment" (IDA). My idea now is to apply the technique of IDA for lateral drilling from existing unproductive wells. The goal is to miniaturize the IDA setup to fit in a 12 mm by 100 mm enclosure, in which the IDA-required controlled mechanical motion for error compensation will be provided by the drilling fluid dynamics in the narrow lateral pipe itself. In addition, a relay-based wireless communication downhole is an essential part of this proposal and involves research on utilizing the existing downhole oil-drilling pipes as waveguides for xbee-based autonomous units optimally positioned within the pipes at their junctions (minimal distance of 10 meters between each xbee unit) and employing the ZigBee communication protocol. The benefits of the proposed approach are twofold: (A) unproductive oil wells could be re-explored laterally for adjacent oil or gas deposits, thus reducing the environmental impact of new well development; and (B) novel, wireless, and much faster communication of downhole measurements will be developed, which will be posed to replace the existing mud-pulse telemetry, an obsolete downhole data transmission technology based on creating pulses in the drilling mud by mechanical valves.