High power density of microhydraulic source by MEMS technology and its application

Abstract

This paper intrdouces an electro-conjugate fluid (ECF) micropump whose pumping sources are fabricated by MEMS technology and mounted on the inside of fluidic channels. ECF is a kind of functional and dielectric fluid. A strong and active jet flow of ECF is generated between electrodes surrounded by ECF, when high DC voltage is applied to the electrodes. Our ECF micropump consists of triangular prism and slit electrode pairs (TPSEs), which can be fabricated by the MEMS technology based on the micromolding of a thick photoresist followed by the electroforming. The experimental results prove that the MEMS-fabricated ECF micropump can be a good candidate as a microhydraulic pressure source for various microactuator systems. The paper also introduces the integration of TPSEs for higher output power. Thanks to the modular design of a TPSE, the output pressure and flow rate of the ECF micropumps are increased by only integrating TPSEs in series and parallel, respectively. In addition to this 2D integration of TPSEs, this paper describes the multilayer fabrication, which is the 3D integration of TPSEs to realize high-aspect-ratio TPSEs. These proposed MEMS-fabricated ECF micropumps as microhydraulic power sources have been applied for various applications, such as soft robots, focus-tunable microlens, droplet-based lab-on-a-chip devices, and so on.