Non-Contact Nanoliter & Picoliter Liquid Dispensing

This paper presents an introduction to non-contact dispensing technologies gaining increasingly importance in numerous application fields, ranging from the life sciences and medical applications to industrial fabrication. Besides a brief overview on typical applications the basic dimensionless numbers to describe droplet breakup are introduced. Based on this formalism criteria for droplet breakup are given and a classification of droplet dispensers according to their working principle is proposed. Examples of dispensing devices are presented for selected applications and it is shown how these fit into the proposed classifications scheme.