DESIGN AND TESTING OF AN ORTHO- PLANAR MICRO-VALVE O. Smal\ B. Raucent\ F. Ceyssens^ R. Puers^ M. De Volder\ D. Reynaerts^ 'Universite Catholique de Louvain, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Div. CEREM, Place du Levant 2, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium ^Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Div. MICAS, Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, 3001 Leuven, Belgium ^Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Div. PMA, Celestijnenlaan 300 B, 3001 Leuven Abstract This paper presents the production and testing of an ortho-planar one- way micro-valve. The main advantages of such valves are that they are very compact and can be made from a single flat piece of material, A previous paper presents and discusses a micro-valve assembly based on a spider spring. The present paper focuses on the valve assembly process and the valve performance.. Several prototypes with a bore of 0.2 mm have been built using two manufacturing techniques (|LIEDM and stereo-lithography) and tested for pressures up to 7 bars. 1 Introduction Micro-valves are one of the most important components of micro-pumps which exist in hundreds of configurations [1]. They exist in various working principles and designs as presented in [2-4]. One of the smallest check valves available commercially is from the Lee Company which is a poppet-type and has a diameter of 3.2 mm and a length of 13.2 mm. A list (non exhaustive) of commercial miniature valves is given in Table 1.1. Table 1.1. Industrial check valves manufacturer Check-all Valve Clippard minimatic Command controls corp. Deltrol Fluid Products Halkey-Roberts Lee Company, The O'Keefe Controls Co Sterling Hydraulics principle Poppet-type Poppet-type Ball Ball Ball Poppet-type Ball Ball diameter 22 mm 9.5 mm 14.2 mm 11.2 mm 7.3 mm 3.2 mm 8 mm 19 mm length 60 mm 19 mm 25 mm 24.5 mm 21.6 mm 13.2 mm 11.6 mm 27.2 mm . [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] il2L_ Please use the following format when citing this chapter: Smal, O., Raucent, B., Ceyssens, F., Puers, R., De Voider, M., Reynaerts, D., 2008, in IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, Volume 260, Micro-Assembly Technologies and Applications, eds. Ratchev, S., Koelemeijer, S., (Boston: Springer), pp. 75-86.