Fabrication and characterization of arbitrary shaped μIPMC transducers for accurately controlled biomedical applications

This paper presents a novel micromachined method for fabricating microfeature sized ion polymer–metal composite (IPMC) devices with arbitrary shapes and demonstrates the technique to develop tiny accurately controlled surgical devices [G.-H. Feng, R.-H Chen, Universal concept for fabricating arbitrary shaped μIPMC transducers and its application on developing accurately controlled surgical devices, in: IEEE MEMS Conference, Kobe, Japan, 2007, pp. 4–7]. This technology is beyond current state-of-the-art approaches in manufacturing large-scale IPMC devices, and provides a universal solution to construct microsize-featured IPMC transducers with fine contours and no short-circuits. Also, the stiffness of the devices for different process parameters of fabrication is characterized by using a microtensile tester. To demonstrate the usefulness of the method, hand-shaped grips (Fig. 2) for laparoscopic operation are designed, fabricated and tested. The fabricated device with the dimensions of 6 mm × 6 mm × 80 μm shows that it could reach a displacement of 300 μm at the location 1 mm away from the anchor when a 0.5 Hz square wave of 12 V is applied, and a maximum instantaneous force of 5 mN output when it is driven with a 0.5 Hz square wave of 12 V.