Abstract
This paper presents the fabrication and test of a novel thermopneumatic micropump made of PDMS without a membrane or a valve. The driving force of the liquid discharge is the pneumatic pressure of heated air and the suction of liquid is accomplished by the surface tension. The proposed micropump has a pump chamber and a pair of air chambers. The air chambers have electric heaters on the Pyrex glass substrate. Each air chamber is connected with the pump chamber through two different air channels which behaves like check valves. The micropump is fabricated through the spin-coating process, the lithograph process, the PDMS molding process, etc. The total size of micropump is 11.7 mm × 8.8 mm × 0.7 mm. The FEM simulation was performed with air inflow and suction instead of air heating. The fabricated micropump was tested for various backward pressures ranging from 0 to 15 cm H 2O. The simulation and the test results confirmed the expected behavior of the micropump. The discharge volume is 116 nL when the input voltage of 3.5 V is applied for 4 s. This proposed micropump is feasible for disposable transdermal drug delivery system.
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