The dual-piston jet injector and the viability of drug delivery

Drug delivery through jet-injection opens the doors to very rapid drug dispersion by eliminating the need for needle sterilization. With this comes the need for a continuous flow of fluids from a large reservoir, currently not available to the single-piston drug delivery systems. A two-piston system in a jet injector enables the use of a cyclic motion of pistons to drive the injected fluids, as opposed to the one-piston design that requires resetting the mechanism. This provides a way to dispense high-volume doses of medication without reloading. In order to test the feasibility of using a two-piston arrangement in jet-injected drug delivery, we have constructed a bench-top version to attempt to achieve the velocities and flow rates needed for jet injection. Using water as the injected fluid, we have found that driving the two pistons with 1800 out-of-phase, 80% symmetric, saw-tooth waveforms and a frequency of 10 Hz is sufficient to inject 900 pIUs of water through the jet and maintain a pressure of more than 2 MPa.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Cunningham, Daniel (Daniel P.)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ian Hunter.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/40410

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/40410