Design rules for a capillary gripper in microassembly

The specificities of microassembly allow to turn oneself to new, and already validated, handling principles like capillary forces. This paper aims at quantifying the influence of major parameters like surface tension, contact angles, gripper geometry, volume of liquid, handling strategy, etc. Therefore, it presents both the numerical and the experimental methodologies that have been used in order to extract design rules of a capillary gripper, to improve the picking capacities on the one hand and the releasing strategies on the other hand