Design and construction of a micropump for drug delivery applications

This paper presents design, construction, and evaluation of a micropump for drug delivery applications. The proposed micropump consists of three components: fluidics, electronics, and software. The fluidics component includes a silicone elastic diaphragm, a microservo, housing and two check valves. The diaphragm is modeled and simulated to establish its geometrical specifications. The housing is built using a rapid prototype machine. The electronics component consists of a microcontroller, a microswitch array, a simple display and a power unit. The software component is written in C and receives inputs from user, controls the microservo speed and displays the programmed speed. A number of experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance and capabilities of the micropump. The experiments focus on measurement of flow rate, dosage and duration of operation. A discussion of the performance and capabilities of the developed micropump is also given.