A measurement setup to investigate the impact on micropumps of pumping protein solution

With liquid micro dosing systems physicians can medicate patients at the hospital better and improve the life quality of patients, who need portable drug delivery devices due to chronic diseases. These devices need an improvement of performance and reliability. A central element of them are micropumps, which need to transport particle-laden liquids, such as drugs, reliably. To understand how micropumps interact with particle-laden liquids, we first need an experimental setup, which enables us to analyse the performance of micropumps in long-term actuation. In this thesis a test setup is developed which can be applied on different types of micropumps and liquids, measuring the degradation of the pump performance due to agglomeration effects. The mobile measurement setup features the possibi lity to measure multiple micropumps in parallel, to control the actuation of each pump to determine the pump characteristic, and to apply pressure in both directions. Furthermore, it is low in cost, because a respectively cheap Sensirion flow sensor can be used to measure the flow rate and the relative changes of the pump performance. Our results demonstrate that the measurement setup is applicable, because the Sensirion sensor features a very good repeatability of its measurement results. In first long-term experiments, environmental changes influenced the measurements, degrading the reproducability of the results. But, we expect to achieve good results when environmental influences, especially the temperature, are kept constant or are further investigated and their influence corrected.T herefore, we anticipate our work to be a first version of an experimental setup to investigate the influences of agglomerates on micropumps in long-term experiments. A next step could be to investigate the long-term performance of micropumps transporting water. But as the setup is meant to be extendable, researchers can apply more sensors or filters to the setup, to apply it to any kind of long-term measurement.