Proportional Microvalve Using a Unimorph Piezoelectric Microactuator

Proportional Microvalve Using a Unimorph Piezoelectric Microactuator

Blog Article

Microvalves are important flow-control devices in many standalone and integrated microfluidic applications.Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)-based pneumatic microvalves are commonly used but they generally require large peripheral connections that decrease portability.There are many alternatives found in the literature that use Si-based microvalves, but variants that can throttle even moderate pressures (1 bar) tend to be bulky (cm-range) or consume high power.

This paper details the development of a low-power, normally-open piezoelectric microvalve to control flows with a maximum driving pressure of 1 bar, but also retain a here small effective form-factor of 5 mm × 5 mm × 1.8 mm.A novel combination of rapid prototyping methods like stereolithography and laser-cutting have been used to realize this device.

The maximum displacement of the Dab Tools fabricated piezoelectric microactuator was measured to be 8.5 μm at 150 V.The fabricated microvalve has a flow range of 0−90 μL min−1 at 1 bar inlet pressure.

When fully closed, a leakage of 0.8% open-flow was observed with a power-consumption of 37.5 μW.

A flow resolution of 0.2 μL min−1—De-ionized (DI) water was measured at 0.5 bar pressure.