Fabrication of micropump for microfluidics application

Abstract

Micropump are devices that can manipulate and control a small volume of fluid. The most appropriate definition restricts this term of pump is the functional dimensions in the micrometer range compare with any kind of small pump that referred as micropump. Micropump have valuable function in microfluidic research become available in every industrial product integration in these recent years. Their overall miniaturized are in size, potential cost and improved dosing accuracy compared to any existing kind of miniature pump. Example of micropump that had been develop were piezoelectric micropump, electrostatic micropump, thermo-pneumatic micropump, pneumatic micropump and electromagnetic micropump. This project is made to fabricate existing micropump. We also add some innovation to make it easy to used and easy to be carried anyway. Nowadays, the usage of technologies to develop better micropump than others require a lot of money. Poly (methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) that used in 3D printing process has poor solvent resistance and poor fatigue resistance. The objectives of this project are to alter the existing micropump design using Arduino microcontroller, using polylactic acid (PLA) in 3D printing process replacing PMMA and to minimize the cost of producing micropump. The flow of the development of this project are through block diagram, flowchart, circuit operation, sketching and designing diagram, assemble the project and troubleshooting the project. The process of combining hardware and software had been done and ready for display as prototype. However, the problem occurs when micropump produce leakage due to fragile. This defect does not apply because it uses PLA material but due to errors in the size of the drawing or the printer’s 3D machine itself. For the conclusions, the purpose of this project to push fluid from micropump into microfluidics partially successful. At the end, three out of our four objectives of this project were achieved.