Laser-based fabrication of polymer micropump

Diffuser micropumps are commonly fabricated using the standard lithography techniques with silicon as the base material. The important components of this type of micropumps are flow-directing diffusers and a moving diaphragm. Different diffuser designs show various flow rates and pump efficiency. In this work a polymer is used as the base material instead of silicon. It is demonstrated that polymer-based micropumps can be conveniently fabricated using the laser machining technique. Moreover, because of the flexibility of polymer materials, there is great potential to improve the performance of the polymer micropumps. The fluid flow inside the diffuser polymer micropump is also calculated using computational fluid dynamics methods and the simulated results are compared with the experimental data. (C) 2004 society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.