Yu-Cheng Ou, Chih-Sheng Yu, Chih-Chung Yang, Chun-Ming Chang, Yu-Hsiang Tang and Yu-Hsin Lin
Instrument Technology Research Center, National Applied Research Laboratories, Hsinchu, Taiwan 300, R.O.C.
Received: December 16, 2011
Accepted: February 29, 2012
Publication Date: December 1, 2012
3-D view of the thermopneumatic micropump.
Copyright The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are cited.
Download Citation: BibTeX | http://dx.doi.org/10.6180/jase.2012.15.4.01
A passive biomimic PDMS valve applied in thermopneumatic micropump is firstly designed and realized. Unlike the conventional peristaltic pumping configuration, the micropump consists of two stacking layers of PDMS on a glass slide. This sandwich-type structure builds up two chambers. A thermopneumatic actuation chamber consists of a 57 ohm heater on the glass slide; the other fluid chamber is connected with inlet and outlet microchannel. A diaphragm between chambers isolates chamber mediums and transmits the thermopneumatic actuation. More importantly, the fluid chamber connects to microchannels via two passive biomimic PDMS valves. Thus, the fluid is driven and constrained in one way flow by the valves. The two passive biomimic PDMS valves produce one-way flow as the actuation diaphragm squeezing and releasing the pumping chamber. The micropump is driven by 1 Hz AC square wave of 10 volt peak. The thermopneumatic PDMS-based micropump is preliminarily tested and driven for 36 seconds. As the result, the measured flow rate of thermopneumatic micropump is 100 nL/min.
Keywords: PDMS Micropump, Passive Valve, Sandwich-Type Structure, Nano-Liter Manipulation
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