Scaling effects of micro bubble actuators

Although microthermal bubble actuation has been applied in many MEMS/BioMEMS devices, little research work has been addressed the scaling of microbubble actuators. In this work, the fundamental investigation of the scaling effects of microbubble actuators is reported. Using a 1.66 ms-wide heating pulse, micro boiling in water was studied on various microbubble actuators, of which feature sizes range from 0.5 μm to 70 μm. We found that there existed a critical heater size (10 μm), for which the boiling pattern with size below or above 10 μm were quite different.