Piezoelectric peristaltic micropump integrated on a microfluidic chip

Abstract

Micropump is extremely useful in miniature biochemical analysis systems for its abilities of manipulating and transporting minute liquid. We developed a novel peristaltic micropump to pump fluids in microfluidic chip in this article. The micropump consists of three piezoelectric actuators, and part of a microfluidic chip as a compressible microchannel. The fluid in the microchannel is transported owning to a series of impacting actions on the microchannel by the piezoelectric actuators. The microchannel is integrated fabricated with the microfluidic chip, which ensures a tiny dead volume less than 300 nL. Being beneficial from the plug-and-play design of the microfluidic chip, there is no cross-contamination for the reagent has no contact with the reusable actuators. Calibration shows the micropump can transport liquid at a high resolution of 8.4 nL/s, a maximum flow rate of 102 nL/s, and backpressure of up to 2.0 K Pa. A demonstration of mixing liquids on a chip was carried out using two micropumps, indicating its great potential for manipulating microamount reagent in biochemical application.