Multiple mini pumps for delivering fluids at 1 μl/min

Support Product Questions
1

Hello there,

I am working on an experimental setup where I need 4-20 mini pumps to accurately deliver fluids at 1 μL/min. Currently, I am using four syringe pumps which have already made my setup pretty bulky, let alone adding 16 more!

I am interested in mini peristaltic pumps (e.g., this one) but I’m open to any other types of mini-pumps.

  1. Is the peristaltic pump in the link above (or such) capable of delivering fluids in the order of μL/min? If not, could you think of an alternative?

  2. What device do I need in order to control the flow rate accurately? Can I control multiple pumps with it?

  3. What else do I need to buy to use the pumps? (e.g. power supply)

Thank you!
Mehdi

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2

Hi Mehdi,

I think that a peristaltic pump is a good solution for delivering liquids accurately however you are wanting to deliver a very small amount.

The pump that you linked specs says:

  • Flow rate: up to 100 mL/min

thats 100,000 times more than you want to deliver!

The linked pump can be controlled by PWM to slow it down, but it wont go that low and realistically, the delivery amount is extremely small.

It’s 50x smaller than a single drop, so I am not sure what your application is, but that is seriously specialist hardware territory, I cant think of a way that you could do this on the hobby scale.

Maybe others can suggest alternatives.

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3

Hi Mehdi,

I think Andrew is on the money here - While you might have more luck with stepper driven peristaltic pump, I’m sure that tolerances as low as you’re looking for are well into specialist territory, where tolerances of the tube manufacturing for instance would have add a comparatively huge error to the output.

-James

4

Hi All
Maybe think along the lines of an inkjet printer delivery system. I think the ink droplets are measured in pL, that is 1,000,000pL = 1µL. Might be worth looking into.
Cheers Bob

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5

Hi Andrew,

Thank you for your reply. I indeed need a very small amount of bio-fluids to be delivered. And I do agree with you that “peristaltic pumps are a good solution for delivering liquids accurately”.

6

Hi James,

Thank you for drawing my attention to stepper-driven peristaltic pumps. I finally could find such a peristaltic pump that can handle flow rates as small as ~0.2 μL/min.

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