Environmental effects on droplet self-alignment assisted hybrid microassembly

This paper reports an experimental study of environmental effects on a hybrid microhandling technique that combines robotic microhandling and droplet based self-alignment. The effects of relative humidity on reliability and on duration of the hybrid microassembly are studied in two cases. The first one is with 300 ¿m × 300 ¿m × 70 ¿m SU-8 parts on the top of another part of the same material and size. The second one is with silicon parts of about 700 ¿m × 700 ¿m × 150 ¿m on hydrophilic patterns. A custom-made microrobotic platform, an environment control system and a high speed camera are used in the study. The study shows that the humidity of the ambient environment has a certain effect on the performance of the hybrid handling strategy. It seems that higher humidity is beneficial to the handling. The results also show that the reliability was lower in low humidities with a small amount of water and the duration was longer in low humidities in certain tests.