Poster: Micro-Pump With No-Moving-Part Valves

Micro-Pumps With No-Moving-Part Valves
University of Washington, Seattle, U.S.A.
Dept of Mechanical Engineering: Fred K. Forster, Ron L. Bardell, Nigel R. Sharma,
Robert J. Penney*, Chris Morris, Ling-Sheng Jang, Andrew Kiehl
Dept of Electrical Engineering: Marty A. Afromowitz, Shuliang Li
Sponser: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

* Former group members.

Pump designs are drawn up with a computer-aided drafting program and transferred onto a quartz mask plate. This mask is used, much like a photographic negative, to transfer the designs to a photo-sensitive coating (photoresist) on the surface of a 3 or 4 inch diameter silicon wafer. This process, known as photo-lithography, removes some of the photoresist leaving a pattern on the wafer’s surface that matches the mask.

The mask you see on the left contains many micropumps, each enclosed in a rectangle. Inside each rectangle the large circle is the pump chanber and the thin wavy lines protruding from each end are the valves. There are a variety of valve designs.