Development of a fast thermal response microfluidic system using liquid metal

Abstract

Room temperature liquid metal gallium alloy has been widely used in many micro-electromechanical systems applications, such as on-chip electrical microheaters, micro temperature sensors, micro pumps and so on. Injecting liquid metal into microchannels can provide a simple, rapid, low-cost but efficient way to integrate these elements in microfluidic chips with high accuracy. The liquid metal-filled microstructures can be designed in any shape and easily integrated into microfluidic chips. In this paper, an on-chip liquid metal-based thermal microfluidic system is proposed for quick temperature control at the microscale. The micro system utilizes just one microfluidic chip as a basic working platform, which has liquid metal-based on-chip heaters, temperature sensors and electroosmotic flow pumps. Under the comprehensive control of these elements, the micro system can quickly change the temperature of a target fluid in the microfluidic chip. These liquid metal-based on-chip elements are very helpful for the fabrication and miniaturization of the microfluidic chip. In this paper, deionized water is used to test the temperature control performance of the thermal microfluidic system. According to the experimental results, the micro system can efficiently control the temperature of water ranging from 28 °C to 90 °C. The thermal microfluidic system has great potential for use in many microfluidic applications, such as on-chip polymerase chain reaction, temperature gradient focusing, protein crystallization and chemical synthesis.