Development of an Automatic Liquid Dosing System in Microliter Scale

The goal of this study is to design a novel automatic liquid dosing system for liquid sampling at the microliter level. For this purpose, a mechatronics system is designed to position a syringe at the desired position in the workspace and then drive its piston to inject the liquid to be sampled. Then, an application-specific algorithm is developed to be able to prepare samples in 3x3, 4x4, and 5x5 sample container arrays with a desired volume. The performance tests are conducted for preparing samples with up to three different liquids. The repetitive experiments are performed for 50 and 100 µL sampling volumes. The results indicated that it is possible to dose a single liquid with the highest average deviation of 3.9%. Moreover, it is found that it is possible to prepare a sample with a mixture of three liquids by the highest average deviation from the reference value of around 3.4% when the targeting sampling volume is 250 µL for each liquid.