3D printing of microneedle patches as components of wearable sensor devices

• Main Author: Liaw, Andy Jun Le
• Other Authors: Poenar Daniel Puiu
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Engineering; Microneedle
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/176974
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Microneedles have been studied for many years to be used as a tool alongside hypodermic syringe in delivering medications or extracting interstitial fluid for monitoring. Although hypodermic syringe has been the standard in these aspects, it poses some disadvantages including painfulness and invasiveness. Thus, this study the need of microneedles on whether it is effective in minimizing the disadvantages hypodermic syringe while having the same or better effective interstitial fluid extraction rate. To reduce the pain while achieving shorter extraction rate, multiple needle designs were created to find out which design among it would achieve the best result. Micro Stereolithography 3D printing was used to produce the needles to measure extraction rate and penetration test. Simulations of the design were created on ABAQUS to understand the buckling effect of each design to sieve out the ones that even under critical buckling, these chosen microneedles would still function. In short, various microneedle designs was proposed which consist of different configurations and test was carried out in 3 parts, an analysis simulation software analyzing critical buckling load, a test to carry out the extraction time and a test to investigate the penetration across the proposed design.