Wireless Controlled Local Heating and Mixing Multiple Droplets Using Micro-Fabricated Resonator Array for Micro-Reactor Applications

Abstract

This paper reported a wireless controlled micro-actuator system for rapid heating and mixing of multiple droplets using integrated arrays of micro-fabricated 2.5 GHz solid-mounted thin-film piezoelectric resonators (SMRs) and a millimeter-scale omnidirectional antenna. An equivalent circuit is proposed to analyze the mechanism of the heating, mixing of the SMR, and the wireless communication system. The heating and mixing rate can be tuned by adjusting the input power as well as the transmission distance between the transmitting antenna and the receiving antennas. A heating rate up to 3.7 °C per second and ultra-fast mixing of the droplet was demonstrated with the wireless microsystem. In addition, two types of circuits, H-shaped and rake-shaped, were designed and fabricated for parallel operating actuator array and controlling the power distribution with the array. Both uniform and gradient heating of the multiple droplets are achieved, which can be potentially applied for developing high-throughput wireless micro-reactor system.

Keywords

• Chemical reactors
• piezoelectric actuators
• wireless communication