Popular version of paper 2aEA7
Presented Wednesday morning, November 29, 2006
4th Joint ASA/ASJ Meeting, Honolulu, Hawaii

This paper describes an application of surface acoustic waves to microfluid systems. Microfluid systems have applications to analyze systems for medicine and the environment as well as ink-jet printer heads and chemical factories. A microfluid system targets micro-channels of the scale of several m (micro-meter; 10^-6 meter) to several hundred m. However, such minute channels have many difficulties such as fluid resistance, micropump/microvalve issues, fabrication method, life, reliability, and so on. In particular, fluid resistance against a channel wall is a big problem for these microfluidic systems. Our micropumping system will reduce fluid resistance against walls by applying surface acoustic waves at wall like a conveyer belt. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a novel fluid actuator device for microfluid systems using surface acoustic waves. Some of the resulting fluid dynamics will be discussed.