Microfluidic Droplet Generation based on Piezoelectric Ceramic Vibrator

Abstract

With the development of microfluidic technology and micro-displacement vibration technology, microdroplets have been widely used in the fields of biological and chemical industry. In the field of micro-displacement vibration research, piezoelectric ceramics become the ideal micro-displacement vibrator because of its excellent properties, including miniaturization, fast response and large bearing capacity. To generate microfluidic droplet, a frequency and amplitude adjustable micro-displacement vibrator is designed. Due to the inverse piezoelectric effect of piezoelectric ceramics, the vibrator adopts the piezoelectric ceramic drive circuit which combines multistage amplification and high voltage amplifier. Meanwhile, the single chip microcomputer is used to produce controllable standard periodic waveforms. Finally, the vibrator is loaded onto the microfluidic chip for droplet generation. In our experiments, the changes of droplets in the microfluidic chip are observed when the piezoelectric ceramics are driven by different waveforms and frequencies. The experimental results show the feasibility of using piezoelectric ceramic micro-displacement vibration to produce microfluidic droplets.