Design and Analysis of a Surface Micromachined Spiral-Channel Viscous Pump

Abstract

A new viscous spiral micropump which uses the surface micromachining technology is introduced. The paper outlines the design of a spiral pump fabricated in five levels of polysilicon using Sandia’s Ultraplanar Multilevel MEMS Technology (SUMMiT), and presents an analytical solution of the flow field in its spiral channel. The pump characteristics are obtained experimentally for a scaled-up prototype and are found to be in good agreement with the results obtained using the analytical model.