A heated needle micromanipulator with hybrid control for heat-caused denaturation in proteins

The paper proposes a micromanipulator with the heated needle as an end effector in order to transfer heat around a micro area of a sample, egg whites. The proposed micromanipulator is controlled by a combination of an explicit model predictive control and PID controller, so-called the hybrid control, to accomplish tracking performances of several reference paths or shapes of heating the specific area. A tungsten needle wrapped with nichrome wire is used as a heat source mechanism and is connected to the two dimensional micromanipulator. The experimental results reveal that the heated needle can provide high temperature up to 50°C with 10μm needle tip diameter. In addition, the results indicate the effective operations for a point heating and denaturing egg whites in micro scale. Moreover, the heated needle is able to heat along the desired paths (a circle, ellipse, square or triangle) with the error less than 2μm from the center of measurement.