Experimental characterization of piezoelectrically actuated micromachined silicon valveless micropump

In this paper, performance of piezoelectrically actuated pyramidal valveless micropumps is studied experimentally in detail. Valveless micropumps based on silicon and glass substrate are fabricated using MEMS technology. Two different sizes of micropumps having overall dimensions of 5 mm x 5 mm x 1 mm and 10 mm x 10 mm x 1 mm are fabricated and characterized. In the fabricated micropumps, the thickness of silicon diaphragm is <20 mu m which gives the advantage of operating pump at low voltage with excellent stability and consistency. The performance of micropumps in terms of flowrate and backpressure is evaluated for a wide range of driving frequency and actuating voltages. The maximum flowrate of water in the 10-mm micropump is 355 mu l/min and backpressure of 3.1 kPa at zero flowrate for an applied voltage of 80 V at frequency 1.05 kHz. The reported micropumps have low footprint, high flowrate and backpressure. Thus, these micropumps are especially suited for biological applications as these can withstand adequate amount of backpressure. Comparative study of the performance of these micropumps with those available in the literature brings out the efficacy of these micropumps.