Laser-based fabrication of micro-fluidic components and systems

Diffuser micro-pumps are commonly fabricated with the standard lithography techniques using silicon as the base material. The important components of this kind of micro-pump are flow directing diffusers and a moving diaphragm. Different diffuser designs show various flow rates and pump efficiency. In this work, polymer is used as its base material instead of silicon. Polymer is cost-effective and relatively easy to be machined with an Excimer laser. Moreover, the flexibility of the material gives a much better performance compared with the silicon based micro-pumps. The measured flow rate of this pump is 10 to 20 times higher than that of the silicon based micro-pumps. In addition, the performance of the diffuser polymer micro-pump is simulated with FLUENT and the calculated result at low frequency is in good agreement with the experimental result.