Fabrication and test of a submicroliter-level thermopneumatic micropump for transdermal drug delivery

This paper presents the fabrication and test of a thermopneumatic micropump without membrane for transdermal drug delivery systems (DDS). A micropump consists of two air chambers, a microchannel and a stop valve The air chambers have ohmic heaters on the Pyrex glass substrate. They can be achieved by the precise control of the drug delivery amount. The micropump is fabricated by the spin-coating process, the lithograph process, the molding process and etc. The total size of micropump and the resistance of the micro heater are 13×9 mm² and 690 Ω, respectively. The meniscus motion in the microchannel is observed with a high speed camera and discharge volume of the micropump is calculated through the frame analysis of the recorded video data. Each discharge volumes are 0.1 μl/for 3 sec at 15 V and 0.1 μl/for 1.8 sec at 20 V.