My past devices that utilize a membrane to separate particles have been haunted by mysterious pieces of junk. The other day I took a moment to inspect the holes that are punched using a sharpened 16ga needle in order to mate capillaries. 10x brightfield image of a punched hole, viewed horizontally …
After a few more revisions of the micro pump, I performed a significantly more thorough characterization. Flow rate was determined as before using a horizontal capillary of known volume and a stop watch. A extremely small thermocouple was inserted into the PDMS substrate directly adjacent to the fluid outlet channel emptying the…
In order to include pumps on the prototype blood analyzer cartridges, it was necessary to implement a small pump using the existing knife-cut PDMS layer layup technique. The diaphragm architecture was selected due to ease of operation and minimal additional part requirements. CAD model of pump in Autodesk Inventor Bottom view of fabricated pump. The…
Oxygen plasma cleaners are a very commonly used tool when bonding PDMS sheets to materials such as PDMS, glass, Si, and SiN. Even though plasma cleaners have proven to be highly effective and reliable tools in this application, they continue to be relatively costly pieces of laboratory equipment. It has been realized that corona discharge…
The goal of our work is a low-cost, portable device that will perform rapid and efficient leukocyte count assays required for treatment of HIV positive patients. The device in mind will benefit from the advantages associated with microfluidic systems such as reduced reagent volume requirements and compact device format. It will utilize patterned microporous membranes…