Programmable syringe pump

Abstract

This project paper presents on the Programmable Syringe Pump. Since there are many kind of syringe pump in the market which are used in hospitals and medical labs, most often the flow rate of dispensing is always tends to be in-accurate. Problems like start-up delays, occlusion, piston gaskets gets stuck has been widely being studied. Researches feel that different type of pump can use only a certain size of syringe to solve the problems. However, in this project, a volume rate syringe pump was designed, instead of flow rate. It is understood that the problems also largely is attribute to the mechanical assembly of the pump, whereby friction and complicated gears has been another root cause aside to syringe size. This project has dealt with a simple designed pump with simple mechanical movement, using a ball screw actuator which overcomes friction problem and a suitable stepper motor. In this project, focused was on a discontinuous pump, where volume is dispensed with respect to time and also position indication in length being measured. The calibration is done using time interval and control is done via a Micro-controller. The experiment was done by defining two kinds of volume rate which is a low volume rate (0.4mL/min) and a high volume rate (1mL/min). Measurements of time reach for every minutes of liquid dispensed and also position reached by the syringe was taken down. The experiment is repeated again this time for a different small size of syringe. It is found that, there was no start up delay occurred for both high and volume rate. Furthermore both time and position accuracy was linear, except that for high volume dispensed the position had a slight deviation. Using a small syringe size proved to be much improvement in a high volume dispensed.