Piezo Actuators: Driving Perfection in Microdosing Applications

Recently there has been a significant breakthrough in microdispensing technology for dosing and printing. Such devices are used for the precise and high unit number printing of arrays and assays. In molecular biology assays are a procedure that measures the activity of a specific drug or biochemical in an organic sample, by testing multiple samples at once. This technique is often used in order to measure enzyme activity, protein binding and gene identification. The actual breakthrough in this technique is in the scale of the process. Instead of using droplets in the milliliter and microliter range, scientists have constructed devices that can produce droplets as small as one nanoliter. The droplets are created by nano-sized actuators that drive pistons into pressure chambers which then deliver one tiny drop of liquid. This of course greatly increases the level of test that can be run at one time as well as making the measurements more accurate.

One idea that struck me while reading this article was how it related to my team’s device design project. Our nanorobots are delivered to the sight of the plaque obstruction inside a highly compact dissolvable bio-membrane. They need to be situated very precisely and in high density so to minimize the space taken up by the membrane inside the artery. What these new devices could do is allow these nanorobots to be printed onto the bio-membrane on an industrial level so that the nanobot filled bio-membranes could be sent to hospitals in bulk and cut down to the right size according to each patients needs.


Source:
http://www.emdt.co.uk/article/piezo-actuators-driving-perfection-microdosing-applications