A Novel Microfluidic Time Gate for Controlling Flow of Liquids

Abstract:

Microfluidic time gates are applied to control accurate flow time of liquids in the autonomous capillary systems, which are critical structures for point-of-care diagnostic and analytical applications. The time gate employs several abruptly changing geometry of the flow path to change the wettability of micro-channels to meet the requirement of delaying flow. However, obtaining desirable flow of liquids in microfluidics is still a limiting factor in the practical implementation. The work demonstrates a novel 2D serial cross-channel time gate and 3D serial cross-channel time gate. They are fabricated in PDMS-based autonomous capillary system. 2D serial cross-channel time gate is comprised of multiple paralleled channels of changeable width with dimensions from 300-800μm. The number of the channels and the width variation of the cross intersections are crucial factors to influence the flow velocity of liquids. Compared with the 2D serial cross-channel time gate, the 3-D structures can eliminate the problem of entrapping air and improve the flow velocity of liquids in the time gate. The controlling time of the flow in 3D serial cross-channel time gate and 2D serial cross-channel time gate are 9~13s and 5s~51s, respectively.

• Periodical: Key Engineering Materials (Volumes 645-646)
• Pages: 730-735
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/KEM.645-646.730
• Online since: May 2015
• Authors: Lu Gan, Chong Liu, Jing Min Li*, Ya Hui Ma, Li Jie Zhou, Hao Zhang, Tao Li, Lei Wang
• Keywords: Capillary Force, Controlling Flow Time, Microfluidic Systems, Time Gate

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