Flexible MEMS Thermal Sensors for Intravascular Flow Monitoring

This book investigated two different thermal sensors for intravascular flow monitoring based on convective heat transfer principle. Both sensors were fabricated by MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) and semiconductor processing. The first thermal flow sensor is one-dimensional (1-D) flexible shear stress sensor. Utilizing the state-of-art MEMS technology, its primary advantages were structural flexibility, bio-compatibility and small size. Then, a novel 3-D thermal flow sensor was developed based on previous flexible 1-D sensors. With computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis, 3-D sensor can potentially achieve a better measurement of shear stress distribution in the presence of time-varying component of blood flow and realize more accurate assessment of intravascular convective heat transfer.