High-speed cell manipulation by backlashless syringe pump

This paper presents a backlashless pump for the high-speed cell manipulation in a microchannel. A piezoelectric actuator is directly connected to the pusher of a syringe for minimizing the backlash during the operation, and, moreover, to achieve high-speed manipulation. The performance of the developed pump is evaluated, and the results show that the response time for the push and pull operations are 41 and 36 milliseconds, respectively. The speed is 4 times faster than the conventional ones, and the controllability of the system is improved correspondingly.