Design and Performance Analysis of a Silicon Carbide Microneedle for Ibuprofen Drug Delivery

Microneedle provides much more efficiency than other implantable devices for transdermal drug delivery system. In this paper, a silicon carbide (SiC) microneedle is designed which consists of four lumens for delivering drug. The proposed microneedle has total length of
$\mathbf{310}\ \boldsymbol{\mu} \mathbf{m}$
having three main parts. The top part of the microneedle is a conical area called tip where four lumens are situated. To design a sharp tip, the surface area is kept about
$12.56\ \mu\mathrm{m}^{2}$
. A cylindrical body having the height of
$220\ \mu \mathrm{m}$
is the middle portion of the microneedle, which has the inner and the outer diameter of
$46\ \mu \mathrm{m}$
and
$72\ \mu \mathrm{m}$
respectively. And the bottom part is the base having the height of
$15\ \mu \mathrm{m}$
. To design, simulate, and for performance analyses of the proposed microneedle, COSMOL Multiphysics Software is used. This work presents the structural and the fluidic related analysis to investigate the performance of this microneedle. Moreover, the load analyses of both axial and transversal loading have been performed to justify the skin insertion capability of the microneedle. The variation of the stress due to the changing of tip surface area is also examined. In the fluid analysis, the inlet pressure ranging from 10 kPa to 100 kPa is applied to observe the flow characteristic of the ibuprofen. The obtained velocity for the inlet pressures of 10 kPa and 100 kPa are respectively 0.379 mm/s and 3.79 mm/s. The simulated results determine that this optimized microneedle can moderately reduce the pain during puncture and able to deliver any drug safely.