Abstract
Low-cost and controllable fluid manipulation in small scale is important to biomedical research, and disease testing and diagnostics. In the midst of global disease outbreaks and pandemics such as Ebola and Covid-19, rapid and low-cost testing and diagnostics have become even more crucial. Lab-on-a-chip platforms are good candidates to be applied in these circumstances due their small footprints and lower-costs which enable rapid-prototyping of these devices. However, providing controlled fluid flow handling in small scale for on-chip devices is not currently suitable for point-of-care applications due to the expensive fluid pumping systems that currently used in most of the lab-on-a-chip devices. In this work, a low-cost and practical peristaltic pump is developed using 3D printing and open-sourced microcontroller platform Arduino boards. The entire system is designed to be portable and capable of producing metered fluid flow in small scale devices. The developed device is characterized to provide adjustable fluid flow control between 1.7 µL/s to 23 µL/s which is suitable for many on-chip applications. The peristaltic pump developed in this work can be used in lab-on-a-chip applications due to its simplicity and low-cost.
Highlights
In the last two decades, miniaturization has become the driving force to engineer more practical and low-cost systems in medical and technological applications [1]
It is possible to power the Arduino with the PC USB connection, but Arduino one of the ground pins is still required to be connected to the same ground of the stepper driver. Powering both the Arduino and the stepper driver with a portable power source is more desirable for lab-on-a-chip applications in remote sites with limited resources as well as for point-of-care diagnostics
A portable and low-cost peristaltic microfluidic pump is presented for providing controllable fluid flow manipulation for lab-on-a-chip applications
Summary
In the last two decades, miniaturization has become the driving force to engineer more practical and low-cost systems in medical and technological applications [1]. There has been a significant advancement in materials research that is investigating more reliable and low-cost materials for a wide range of applications [4,5]. Both with the new materials and advanced microfabrication tools, miniaturized systems including microfluidics have become available. While the motivation and the goal of this new field are to reduce the cost of testing, analysis and diagnostics in biomedical research, and eliminate the dependence on central facilities, the requirement of peripheral elements such as pumps and flow regulators to drive the microfluidic lab-on-a-chip devices hinders their wide-spread implementation
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