Development of a peristaltic pump in printed circuit boards

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a peristaltic pump based on the printed circuit board (PCB) technique. The pump was fabricated by using PCB as the substrate material and standard PCB techniques (copper etching, soldering). The paper describes in details the development process including the numerical simulation of the pump effect, the investigation of the piezoelectric actuator, the fabrication and the characterization. A maximum flow rate of 3 ml/min can be achieved with a single peristaltic pump. One of the applications of the peristaltic pump is a self-cooling printed circuit board (SC-PCB). The SC-PCB consists of three peristaltic pumps, a channel system for fluid circulation, and a heat sink. The SC-PCB shows great potentials in thermal management of electronic devices.