Development and Research on Lego-Type Modular Components for the Application of Microfluidic Chips
Date Issued
2009
Date
2009
Author(s)
Liou, Dar-Sun
Abstract
A new modular design concept for microfluidic devices is proposed and demonstrated in this work. I design three key modular microfluidic components: membrane pumps, unidirectional membrane valves and guiding-fluid reservoirs, and demonstrate that a microfluidic device with specific functions can be easily assembled with those key modular components. Since all components are combination maneuverable similar to the concept of Lego, this design is named Lego-Type Modular Components or LTMC. My pumps run on man-power so that the assembled microfluidic devices require no other power sources like expensive syringe pumps or air compressors. This feature makes the assembled microfluidic devices completely portable. I also successfully combine my assembled device with other existing mixing microchannels, to serve as the mixing and loading system in PCR experiment to amplify DNA. Besides, I design a simple microchannel to separate particles in fluids by size. With integration of particles sieving chip and LTMC unit to have the control in switching channels, it is successfully found that the size distribution of the head part is different from that of the tail part. This result shows that these modular components can be integrated into other microchannels, implying great potential applications of the modular design.
Subjects
micropump
microvalve
microfluidic device
modular design
particles sieving
Type
thesis
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