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 transdermal drug delivery (TDD) have been presented. Combination of isotropic and anisotropic etching process has been used to facilitate the fabrication of microneedles in inductively coupled plasma (ICP) etcher. Using ANSYS, structural and micro°uidic analysis hasbeen performed before the fabrication to insure the microneedle design suitability for TDD. In finite element analysis (FEM), the effect of axial and transverse 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 x 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.