Abstract
Recent advances in microfluidic devices put a high demand on small, robust and reliable pumps suitable for high-throughput applications. Here we demonstrate a compact, low-cost, directly attachable (clip-on) electroosmotic pump that couples with standard Luer connectors on a microfluidic device. The pump is easy to make and consists of a porous polycarbonate membrane and poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) electrodes. The soft electrode and membrane materials make it possible to incorporate the pump into a standard syringe filter holder, which in turn can be attached to commercial chips. The pump is less than half the size of the microscope slide used for many commercial lab-on-a-chip devices, meaning that these pumps can be used to control fluid flow in individual reactors in highly parallelized chemistry and biology experiments. Flow rates at various electric current and device dimensions are reported. We demonstrate the feasibility and safety of the pump for biological experiments by exposing endothelial cells to oscillating shear stress (up to 5 dyn/cm2) and by controlling the movement of both micro- and macroparticles, generating steady or oscillatory flow rates up to ± 400 μL/min.
Highlights
Microfluidic cell culture devices typically rely on some transport mechanism to drive flow through a cell culture compartment
We demonstrate a clip-on electroosmotic pump that generates flow rates up to 400 μL/ min
The maximum microparticle velocity corresponded to a volumetric flow rate of 100 μL/min at ± 5 mA in the μ-Slide VI0.1
Summary
Microfluidic cell culture devices typically rely on some transport mechanism to drive flow through a cell culture compartment. The transport can be driven through mechanical action, e.g., syringe pumps or peristaltic pumps, or using a nonmechanical technique, such as electroosmosis- or hydrodynamic pressure-based pumps, e.g., pneumatic or gravity-driven pumps. Several on-chip pumps reported recently, such as monolithic microfabricated pumps, (Unger et al 2000) electrochemically actuated pumps, (Suzuki and Yoneyama 2003) and acoustofluidic pumps (Huang et al 2014), address these issues These pumps require only minute amounts of fluid and can be directly integrated into the microfluidic device. These pumps specialize in delivering low volumes of fluids at low flow rates and are not readily compatible
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