Investigation on the performance of valveless pump for microdelivery of the fluid, fabricated using tool-based micromachining setup

Abstract

Micropump is an integrated part of microfluidic system and is a boon to the field of miniaturization, owing to its helping hand in numerous applications mainly in biomedical, electronic cooling, fuel cells, spacecraft, etc. In this paper, an attempt is made to design and fabricate valveless pump, with active and passive valves. The actuation element used is piezowafer, piezowafer was experimentally tested and compared with simulated values from ANSYS for its peak displacement and these displacements were used to find volume pumped by pump. The pumping volumes found by experimentation are in good agreement with the simulated results. Further fabrication of valveless pump is carried out by using tool-based micromachining center which is a novel type of fabrication technique in micromachining. Through experiments, the optimum frequency of the pump was found to be 60Hz at an actuating voltage of 150V. The maximum head that a pump could pump was found to be 0.051m with pressure of 500.13Pa. The flow rate of the pump had a decreasing trend with increase in head. © 2017 World Scientific Publishing Company.