Design, simulation and fabrication of silicon microneedles for bio-medical applications

Abstract

In this paper, design, analysis and fabrication of hollow out-of-plane silicon microneedles for transder-mal drug delivery (TDD) have been presented. Com-bination of isotropic and anisotropic etching process has been used to facilitate the fabrication of micronee-dles in inductively coupled plasma (ICP) etcher. Us-ing ANSYS, structural and microfluidic analysis has been performed before the fabrication to insure the microneedle design suitability for TDD. In finite el-ement analysis (FEM), the effect of axial and trans-verse load on single microneedle has been investigated to envisage the mechanical properties of microneedle. The analysis predicts that the resultant stresses due to applied bending and axial loads are in the safe range. In computational fluid dynamic (CFD) static analysis, the fluid flow rate through 5*5 microneedle array has been investigated by applying the pressure 10 kPa to 130 kPa at the inlet to insure that the microneedles are capable for flow of drug up to the desired range for TDD.