Design and fabrication of a micro thermal actuator for cellular grasping

The development of a novel polymer-based micro robotic gripper that can be actuated in a fluidic medium is presented. Our current work is to explore new materials and designs for thermal actuators to achieve micromanipulation of live biological cells. Parylene C is used to encapsulate a metal heater, resulting in effectively a tri-layered thermal actuator. Parylene C is a bio-compatible dielectric polymer that can serve as a barrier to various gases and chemicals. Therefore, it is suitable to serve as a thermal/electrical/chemical isolation material for protecting the metal heater from exposing to an aqueous environment. We have demonstrated parylene actuators (2 mm × 100 μm × 0.5 μm) to operate in an aqueous environment using 10 to 80 mW input power. The temperature of these actuators at full deflection was estimated to be -60°C, which was much lower than the typical requirement of >100°C to actuate other conventional MEMS actuators. Danio rerio follicles in fluidic medium were captured successfully using these actuators. Moreover, these actuators were found to be responsive to moderate rise in environmental temperature, and hence, we could vary the fluidic medium temperature to actuate trimorphs on a chip without any input of electrical energy, i.e., raising the fluidic temperature from 23°C to 60°C could actuate the trimorphs to grasp follicles of -1 mm size in diameter. At 60°C, the embryos inside the follicles were observed to be alive, i.e., they were still moving in the biological fluid isolated by the follicle membrane. The smallest follicles grasped were -500 μm in diameter using 800 μm × 130 μm × 0.6 μm actuators. The fabrication process, modeling, and optimization of the trimorph actuators are presented. Based on the successful operation of these polymer-based actuators, we are currently developing multifinger thermal microgrippers for cellular grasping and manipulation, which can potentially be hybridly integrated with circuits for computer control.