Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary , Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4, Canada.
Semnan University , Semnan, Iran.
Biomicrofluidics. 2015 Feb 6;9(1):014113. doi: 10.1063/1.4907673. eCollection 2015 Jan.
The AC electrothermal technique is very promising for biofluid micropumping, due to its ability to pump high conductivity fluids. However, compared to electroosmotic micropumps, a lack of high fluid flow is a disadvantage. In this paper, a novel AC multiple array electrothermal (MAET) micropump, utilizing multiple microelectrode arrays placed on the side-walls of the fluidic channel of the micropump, is introduced. Asymmetric coplanar microelectrodes are placed on all sides of the microfluidic channel, and are actuated in different phases: one, two opposing, two adjacent, three, or all sides at the same time. Micropumps with different combinations of side electrodes and cross sections are numerically investigated in this paper. The effect of the governing parameters with respect to thermal, fluidic, and electrical properties are studied and discussed. To verify the simulations, the AC MAET concept was then fabricated and experimentally tested. The resulted fluid flow achieved by the experiments showed good agreement with the corresponding simulations. The number of side electrode arrays and the actuation patterns were also found to greatly influence the micropump performance. This study shows that the new multiple array electrothermal micropump design can be used in a wide range of applications such as drug delivery and lab-on-a-chip, where high flow rate and high precision micropumping devices for high conductivity fluids are needed.
交流电电热技术在生物流体微泵送方面很有前景，因为它能够泵送高电导率的流体。然而，与电渗流微泵相比，其缺乏高流量是一个缺点。在本文中，介绍了一种新颖的交流电多阵列电热（MAET）微泵，该微泵利用放置在微泵流道侧壁上的多个微电极阵列。非对称共面微电极放置在微流道的所有侧面，并以不同的相位进行激励：一个、两个相对、两个相邻、三个或所有侧面同时。本文对不同组合的侧电极和横截面的微泵进行了数值研究。研究并讨论了控制参数对热、流体和电气性能的影响。为了验证模拟，然后制造并实验测试了交流电 MAET 概念。实验得到的流体流量与相应的模拟结果吻合良好。侧电极阵列的数量和激励模式也被发现对微泵性能有很大影响。这项研究表明，新的多阵列电热微泵设计可用于广泛的应用，如药物输送和芯片实验室，在这些应用中需要用于高电导率流体的高流量和高精度微泵送设备。
