Quantitative Analysis of Pneumatically Driven Biomimetic Micro Peristalsis

A pneumatically operated peristaltic micro pump can play an important role in nanoliter or picoliter scale fluid handling and delivery for biomimetic micro-scale peristalsis system as well as biological and chemical applications. Here, we first investigate the performance of peristaltic micro peristaltic system that are composed of pneumatically operated micrometer scale mechanical valve. We examined the effect of the number of pumping valves, from two to six, with variations of the operating frequency. The micro pumps with 200x100 mu m(2) of valve area in 100 mu m wide and 10 mu m deep microchannels were mechanically actuated using a pneumatic pressure source and the optimum valve number and efficient operating frequency were found. This study provides an improved understanding of the working mechanism of microfabricated peristaltic pumps and delivers practical information for the design of robust and efficient peristaltic fluid manipulation systems with nanoliter or picoliter volumes of target samples.This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF CBET Grant 1063536), USA, and the US Department of Agriculture (2009-35603-0505). We also acknowledge partial support of the Global Frontier Project Grant (2014M3A6A4062860), Small Grant Exploratory Research (2014R1A1A2A160552910) and Engineering Research Center (2008-0061891) of the National Research Foundation funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning of Korea