Abstract
In order to get rid of the dependence on expensive photolithography technology and related facilities, an economic and simple design and fabrication technology for digital microfluidics (DMF) is proposed. The electrodes pattern was generated by inkjet printing nanosilver conductive ink on the flexible Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate with a 3D circuit board printer, food wrap film was attached to the electrode array to act as the dielectric layer and Teflon® AF was sprayed to form a hydrophobic layer. The PET substrate and food wrap film are low cost and accessible to general users. The proposed flexible DMF chips can be reused for a long time by replacing the dielectric film coated with hydrophobic layer. The resolution and conductivity of silver traces and the contact angle and velocity of the droplets were evaluated to demonstrate that the proposed technology is comparable to the traditional DMF fabrication process. As far as the rapid prototyping of DMF is concerned, this technology has shown very attractive advantages in many aspects, such as fabrication cost, fabrication time, material selection and mass production capacity, without sacrificing the performance of DMF. The flexible DMF chips have successfully implemented basic droplet operations on a square and hexagon electrode array.
Highlights
The digital microfluidics system has developed rapidly in last few years [1] in response to the need for handling and manipulating pico-to-microliter volume of fluids [2,3]
In digital microfluidics (DMF) devices, discrete droplets containing different biochemical samples or reagents are typically manipulated for various analysis and detection by applying a series of electrical potentials to an array of electrodes coated with a dielectric layer and a hydrophobic layer, which is referred to as electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD), one of the most common actuation mechanisms
In the traditional fabrication technology, the patterned electrodes are fabricated by standard metal photolithography and sputtering on glass and silicon substrate, or etching on printed circuit boards based on copper substrate [5,6,7,8,9]
Summary
The digital microfluidics system has developed rapidly in last few years [1] in response to the need for handling and manipulating pico-to-microliter volume of fluids [2,3]. In the traditional fabrication technology, the patterned electrodes are fabricated by standard metal photolithography and sputtering on glass and silicon substrate, or etching on printed circuit boards based on copper substrate [5,6,7,8,9] The former needs a clean-room facility while the latter adds to the complexity as it required additional chemical etching and the printed circuit board (PCB)-based DMF chip has the deep trenches between electrodes that maybe hinder the droplet movement [5]. Due to high material and fabrication cost, high time consumption, lack of rapid prototyping, stringent requirements on the clean-room facility, and difficulty of optical detection, the traditional fabrication process of a digital microfluidic device is a bottleneck for the DMF accessibility in laboratories, which decrease its superiority and in particular are not well fit for point-of-care testing (POCT) for low-resource settings, such as remote areas and developing nations. WTilemflionng®toAnF, 1N60C0, (UDSuApo) natr,eWuislemdinagstothne, NhCyd, UroSpAh)oabrieculaseydera.sStihleichoyndoroilpwhoitbhicalakyinere.mSialitciocnvoisicl owsiitthy of a kinematic viscosity of 10 cst (Dow Corning, Midland, MI, USA) acts as lubrication and medium 10fcilslitn(gDionwFDCMorFnCin. g, Midland, MI, USA) acts as lubrication and medium filling in FDMFC
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