Design and simulation of a piezoelectric micropump for drug delivery systems

In this paper a piezoelectric micropump to be used in a drug delivery system is presented, for the specific application of providing synthetic lacrimal fluid to people suffering from dry eye disease. The proposed design focuses on portability, low voltage polarization, and achieving an average output flow rate of 1.10 ll/min, which is the average flow rate for lacrimal fluid production in a healthy individual. The micropump was simulated using the finite element analysis software COMSOL Multiphysics (R). The maximum flow rate obtained by a single micropump device was 0.39 ll/min operating at 20 V peak with a frequency of 1.1 kHz. Aiming to achieve the desired output flow rate, an array of three parallel micropumps was designed to increase the output flow rate; this array obtained a flow rate of 1.15 ll/min without the need of raising the polarizing voltage and only increasing the device power consumption from 8.56 to 25.7 pWh.