Structural and microfluidic analysis of MEMS based out-of-plane hollow silicon microneedle array for drug delivery

Microneedles are gaining popularity because of the ability to deliver the drug through the skin at desire therapeutic range. In this paper, design, structural analysis and fabrication of tapered tip out-of-plane hollow silicon microneedle array for transdermal drug delivery (TDD) applications is first presented. Then computational fluid dynamic (CFD) static analysis is presented to investigate the pressure distribution and velocity distribution of fluid through 5 × 5 microneedle array. The static pressure 10 kPa to 130 kPa was applied for fluidic analysis. Inductively coupled plasma (ICP) etcher machine is used to facilitate the isotropic and anisotropic etching process during the fabrication. Finite element method (FEM) using ANSYS rather than analytical system has been used to perform the simulation. The effect of axial and transverse loads on the microneedles during skin insertion is investigated in the stress analysis. The analysis predicts that the resultant stresses due to applied bending and axial loads are in the safe range. The presented research work provides predicted data to fabricate optimized designs of silicon microneedle array for biomedical applications.