Tapered tip hollow silicon microneedles for transdermal drug delivery

Microneedles are gaining popularity from last few years because of its potential applications in medical field. In this paper, fabrication and structural analysis of tapered tip hollow silicon out-of-plane microneedles for transdermal drug delivery (TDD) are presented. Inductively coupled plasma (ICP) etching technology has been used to fabricate the silicon microneedles. To envisage the mechanical strength of microneedles the structural analysis using ANSYS has been performed. The effect of axial and transverse load on the microneedles during skin insertion is investigated in the stress analysis. The analysis predicts that the resultant stress values due to applied bending and axial loads are in the safe range.