A low cost open droplet-based microfluidic devices on printed circuit board

Abstract

Microfluidics technology dominates laboratory facilities as microscale devices where large scale of laboratories equipment no longer needed. These microfluidic devices are very useful in many applications including clinical diagnostics and cell based analysis, where micro to nano liter range of samples can be used to run the bioassays. Recently, various study of digital microfluidic devices have been done and the fabrication techniques used have shown to be expensive. In this paper, a low cost open plate droplet-based digital microfluidic devices using Electrowetting on Dielectrics (EWOD) technique is fabricated and experimentally demonstrated. The proposed system features a 2×4 electrodes array on a standard FR4 printed circuit board (PCB) technology. In this method, open droplet-based microfluidic device is formed from copper substrates with a gap width of 203.2 μm between the inter-electrode. By replacing the expensive dielectric and hydrophobic coatings materials such as parylene-C and Teflon-AF, saran wrap (polyethylene film) and cooking oil has been used, respectively. Additionally, the system has been tested for open EWOD configuration by dispensing 2.5 μL of distilled water. Thus, a low cost of fabrication method enables the system setup of digital microfluidics without the need of clean room facilities.