A high flow rate thermal bubble-driven micropump with induction heating

A thermal bubble-driven micropump with magnetic induction heating is successfully demonstrated in this paper. Energy is transferred from the planar coil outside the microchamber to the metal heating plate inside the microchamber through the electromagnetic field, and Joule heat is induced by the eddy current in the heating plate. Sequential photographs of bubble nucleation, growth and shrink in open environment were recorded by a CCD camera. One advantage of the micropump is that there is no physical contact between the heating plate and the external power supply circuit, which resulted in an easy fabrication process. What’s more, compared with other thermal bubble-driven micropump with resistive microheater, the flow rate and the pump stroke have been improved significantly due to its larger dimension of the heating plate and larger bubbles volume. The experiments show that the maximum flow rate of this micropump is about 102.05 μL/min, which can expand the potential applications, especially for microfluidic system that requires higher flow rate.