In Situ Fine-Tuning of Microfluidic Chips by Swelling and Its Application to Droplet Microfluidics
In Situ Fine-Tuning of Microfluidic Chips by Swelling and Its Application to Droplet Microfluidics
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DOI：
10.1002/admt.201900232
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发表时间：
2019-08-01
影响因子：
6.8
通讯作者：
Chastanet, Guillaume
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Gonzalez-Estefan, Juan H.;Gonidec, Mathieu;Chastanet, Guillaume
在过去的二十年中，聚二甲基硅氧烷（PDMS）由于易于通过软光刻复制模塑方法制造PDMS装置而被广泛用作微流体装置的快速通量原型制作的选择材料。然而，已知PDMS在各种有机溶剂中显著溶胀，这有时限制了其在合成化学中的使用，并导致微流体界认为PDMS与此类溶剂“不相容”。尽管如此，如这里所示，当分析得更深入并适当控制时，PDMS的溶剂诱导的溶胀实际上构成了一种潜在有用的现象，可以成为一种简单的工具来原位精细地和动态地控制和调节微流体芯片的几何形状。在本文中，这种方法被应用到各种液滴发生器的行为的控制。这种方法的简单性和效率使其成为液滴微流体合成的重要资产，微反应器的大小是一个关键参数，由于其复杂的实现而经常被忽视。在更一般的意义上，预计将膨胀集成到设计中应该允许调整表现出几何形状驱动功能的许多不同类型的芯片的功能。
Over the last two decades, polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) has been widely used as the material of choice for fast-throughput prototyping of microfluidic devices due to the ease of fabrication of PDMS devices by soft-lithography replica molding methods. Nevertheless, PDMS is known to swell significantly in a variety of organic solvents which has sometimes limited its use in synthetic chemistry and has led the microfluidic community to consider PDMS as being "incompatible" with such solvents. Nevertheless, as shown here, when analyzed deeper and controlled properly, the solvent-induced swelling of PDMS actually constitutes a potentially useful phenomenon that can become a simple tool to control and adjust finely and dynamically the geometry of microfluidic chips in situ. In this paper, this method is applied to the control of the behavior of a variety of droplet generators. The simplicity and efficiency of this approach make it a great asset for droplet microfluidics synthesis, for which microreactor sizes are a critical parameter that is often overlooked due to its complex implementation. In a more general sense, it is expected that integrating swelling into design should allow to adjust the function of many different types of chips exhibiting geometry-driven functions.