Pulsatile Drug Delivery System Based on Electrohydrodynamic Method

TL;DR

This paper presents a compact electrohydrodynamic system capable of precisely generating and delivering tiny drug droplets, with theoretical modeling and experimental validation demonstrating its stability and controllability for pulsatile drug delivery.

Contribution

It introduces a novel EHD-based drug delivery device with detailed theoretical expressions for droplet size and formation time, validated through experiments.

Findings

Generated droplets as small as 2.83 nL in 8.5 ms

Device dimensions are 2×2×3 mm^3

System demonstrates stable and controllable droplet production

Abstract

Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) generation, a commonly used method in BioMEMS, plays a significant role in the pulsatile drug delivery system for a decade. In this paper, an EHD based drug delivery system is well designed, which can be used to generate a single drug droplet as small as 2.83 nL in 8.5 ms with a total device of 2\times2\times3 mm^3, and an external supplied voltage of 1500 V. Theoretically, we derive the expressions for the size and the formation time of a droplet generated by EHD method, while taking into account the drug supply rate, properties of liquid, gap between two electrodes, nozzle size, and charged droplet neutralization. This work proves a repeatable, stable and controllable droplet generation and delivery system based on EHD method experimentally as well as theoretically.