Analysis and Fabrication Process of an Electro-Magnetically Actuated Valveless Micropump with Two Parallel Flexible Diaphragms

A parallel dynamic passive valveless micropump was designed, which consists of three layers—valve, diaphragm and electromagnetic coil. The valve was wetly etched in a silicon wafer, the diaphragm was a PDMS (polydimethyl siloxane) film spun on a silicon wafer with embedded permanent magnet posts, and the coil was electroplated on a silicon substrate. Under the actuation of the magnetic field generated by coils, the flexible diaphragm could be displaced upwards and downwards. After analyzing magnetic and mechanical characteristic of the flexible membrane and direction-dependence of the nozzle, a micropump was designed. And the relative length (L/d) of the micropump nozzle was taken 4. A 7 × 7 array of permanent magnetic posts was embedded in the PDMS film. Two diaphragms worked in an anti-step mode, which could relieve the liquid shock and increase the discharge of the micropump. The ANSYS® and Matlab® were adopted to analyze the actuation effect of the coil and the flow characteristic of the micropump. Results show that when actuated under a 0.3 A, 100 Hz current, the displacement of the diaphragm is more than 30 μm, and the discharge of the micropump is about 6 μL/s.