Fabrication and characterization of gold coated hollow silicon microneedle array for drug delivery

• Fabrication method for an array of hollow tapered Si microneedles is presented.
• Si microneedles biocompatibility is increased by coating Ti &Au.
• The breaking force of fabricated microneedles is 10 times above the skin resistive force.
• Flow rate variation through microneedles with respect to different inlet pressure is studied.

In this paper, we present the fabrication and characterization of Ti and Au coated hollow silicon microneedles for transdermal drug delivery applications. The hollow silicon microneedles are fabricated using isotropic etching followed by anisotropic etching to obtain a tapered tip. Silicon microneedle of 300 μm in height, with 130 μm outer diameter and 110 μm inner diameter at the tip followed by 80 μm inner diameter and 160 μm outer diameter at the base have been fabricated. In order to improve the biocompatibility of microneedles, the fabricated microneedles were coated with Ti (500 nm) by sputtering technique followed by gold coating using electroplating. A breaking force of 225 N was obtained for the fabricated microneedles, which is 10 times higher than the skin resistive force. Hence, fabricated microneedles can easily be inserted inside the skin without breakage. The fluid flow through the microneedles was studied for different inlet pressures. A minimum inlet pressure of 0.66 kPa was required to achieve a flow rate of 50 μl in 2 s with de-ionized water as a fluid medium.

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