Effect of Non-Planar Tungsten V-Electrode Pattern in a 3D Printed Microfluidic System

Abstract

Abstract Manipulation, guiding, and focusing of particles is an important phenomenon in the area of biomedical research. In most cases, particles are suspended in a microfluidic environment. These microfluidic environments can be high or low conductive. Most importantly these flows seeded with the micro-particles are manipulated and guided in microfluidic channels. Microfluidic channels have very low dimensions and considering the flow rate the characteristic of the flow in a microfluidic channel is laminar in nature. There are many micromachining methods available for fabricating microfluidic channels such as soft-lithography, wet etching, electroforming, PDMS molding, laser ablation followed by wet etching but in most of these cases, a microfabrication facility is required which is very costly in nature. Now a days 3D printing process is widely used to design microfluidic channels as a cheap process for conducting laboratory experiments. In this work, a 3D printed microfluidic channel fabrication process was presented along with a CAD drawing with microstructural dimension analysis. Previously V-electrode pattern was used in the static fluid system. In this work, a V-elect rode pattern was inserted in the microfluidic system for the first time to analyze the behavior of the flowing fluid of different conductivity under the application of AC current. The flow characteristics were presented and analyzed with the Reynolds number and the flow region of maximum velocity before and after the implementation of the AC electric field. The direction of the flow was also observed in the V-shaped microfluidics environment.