Driving Liquids with Thermal Actuators

Moving liquids in microfluidic devices is nowadays a key issue. Existing techniques to drive liquids in microdevices does not allow controlling several single channels or are invasive in the case biological systems for living organisms. Our work deals with a new technique to drive liquids in each single channel of a microfluidic device. This technique is bioinspired by small organism movement and uses thermal actuators as a mean to move liquids. Those thermal actuators are performed by polysilicon selective epitaxial growth to obtain thicker structures than with conventional processes.