Design and Fabrication of Novel Compliant Electrostatically Actuated Microvalves
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Electrostatically actuated microvalves are appealing candidates to build fully integrated microfluidic circuits because of the direct transduction of electrical signals into mechanical responses at low power consumption levels. Practical solutions, however, are still lacking due to their multi-layered architecture and difficulties in incorporating heterogeneous materials. In this paper, we report the design and fabrication process of an electrostatically actuated gas microvalve amenable to large scale integration for gas flow control. The device we designed consists of an upper die, containing a flexible electrode sealed by a thin elastic membrane, and a lower die, containing gas channels of trapezoidal cross-section and fixed electrodes. Each microvalve is defined by one fixed electrode spanning the floor and sidewalls of the trapezoidal gas channel and one corresponding flexible electrode suspended above the channel. In contrast to the conventional parallel-plate arrangement of electrodes, the two electrodes are approximated starting from the edges of the trapezoidal gas channel during the actuation step, which is advantageous for lowering the required actuation voltage. The upper die was fabricated by replica molding in polymeric material, the lower die was fabricated in a glass substrate by conventional microfabrication techniques, and the two dies were subsequently aligned and bonded using an adhesive layer. This reported low cost fabrication process could be implemented in any basic microfabrication facility. When a net pressure up to 1 bar was applied to the gas channel, reasonable flow rate was achieved. We also observed displacement of the flexible membrane when a DC voltage of 200 V was applied to a pair of electrodes. These preliminary results show that this microvalve is a promising candidate for integrated on-chip valving and will allow for building large scale microfluidic circuits with reduced power consumption.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".