Performance and design improvements toward the commercialization of a needle-free jet injector/

In the past years, the BioInstrumentation Lab has developed a handheld needle-free jet injector based on a custom Lorentz-force motor. While the current handheld design is effective as a research tool, many improvements are needed before it can be a commercially viable product for individual human use. Improvements in various aspects of the design have been implemented. A Hall effect sensor and a thermopile were added to provide critical safety and quality monitoring of the Lorentz-force motor, and a linear encoder provided increased position resolution. Flexible coil elements reduced drag on the coil while eliminating a mechanical failure mode caused by moving cables. A low cost optical encoder system has been implemented to provide 5 pm position resolution for the actuator and this has improved error of volume ejections to 0.3 pL. All these improvements have also been proved to be scalable by their implementation on a scaled down design of the current actuator. This actuator was modeled and verified to have approximately half the force output of the current actuator, and is small and light enough to be packaged in a portable device. Lastly, an adaptor that allows extraction of drug out of a vial using the BioInstrumentation Lab's needle-free injector has been developed as well as an automatic detection scheme that expels any air drawn in by this extraction process with minimal fluid loss.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Modak, Ashin (Ashin Pramod)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ian W. 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/1721.1/87921

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/87921