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Abstract: This paper present a two dimensional pneumatic actuator based on silicon MEMS technology for objects micro-manipulation using tilted air jets. The device is composed of three layers stacked together, two micro-machined silicon wafers and a Pyrex glass wafer. The system is composed of a set of micro-conveyors in about 9mm×9mm area. Each micro-conveyor has four nozzles and can generate tilted air-jets which allow four conveyance directions. An experiment of the conveyance of a silicon chip of 3mm diameter and weighing approximately 2mg was performed with pulsed air flow. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents the design, fabrication and testing of a new two-dimensional pneumatic conveyor for micro-chips manipulation. The conveyor can levitate and move flat objects to a desired position using controlled air-flow. The structure consists of a sandwich of silicon–silicon–Pyrex layers fabricated using MEMS technologies, in which deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) and ultrasonic micro-machining techniques were used for the fabrication of silicon and Pyrex chips, respectively. The silicon–silicon wafers and silicon–Pyrex wafers were bonded by gold eutectic bonding and anodic bonding techniques, respectively. The device array is about 9mm×9mm of surface dimension and composed of 8×8 pneumatic micro-conveyors. A micro-conveyor has four nozzles that can generate inclined air-jets allowing four conveyance directions. We demonstrate experimentally that a 3mm diameter object of 2mg weight can be conveyed to a desired position with intermittent air-flow of 20kPa. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]