Development and characterization of thermopneumatic peristaltic micropumps

In this paper, the development and characterization of thermopneumatic peristaltic micropumps are presented. Micropumps with three different designs are fabricated using soft lithography techniques. The equivalent circuit models of a thermopneumatic actuation cell are formulated. The analytical solutions for predicting the device transient behavior are also derived. The dynamical responses of the diaphragms are measured using an interferometer, and are in good agreement with the modeled results. Tiny drive circuits, which require only 5 V, are implemented for driving the pumps. The dimension of an integrated 3-chamber micropump system, which consists of a pump and a drive circuit, is 16 mm x 18 mm x 5.5 mm. The optimal operating conditions, such as actuation sequences, operating frequencies and duty ratios, are obtained. The maximum flow rate occurs at a driving frequency of 1.5 Hz with a duty ratio of 40% using a three-phase actuation sequence. A simplified pseudo thermo-fluid-structure-interaction (pT-FSI) model is also proposed to estimate the pumping characteristic. The model gives reasonable results under low operation frequency. Under zero backpressure, the maximum flow rates for the 3, 5 and 7-chamber devices are very close, whereas the devices with larger numbers of pumping chambers exhibit better pumping performance under higher backpressure.