Evaluation methodology of gas permeable characterization in a polymer-based microfluidic device by confocal fluorescence imaging

Abstract

The evaluation technique of gas permeable characterization has been developed for an increased efficiency of gas–liquid chemical reactions and high accuracy of environmental diagnosis. This technique enables us to measure spatial distributions of velocity and dissolved gas concentration by utilizing confocal micron-resolution particle image velocimetry combined with a laser-induced fluorescence technique. Microfluidic devices with gas permeability through polymer membranes are composed of a cover glass and a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) chip with the ability to permeate various gases, since PDMS is an elastomeric material. In the chip, microchannels are manufactured using a cryogenic micromachining system. The gas permeation is dominated by several factors, such as the gas and liquid flow rates, the membrane thickness between the gas and liquid flow, and the surface area of the membranes. The advantage of the present device is to realize the control of gas permeability by changing the surface roughness of PDMS, because the cryogenic micromachining enables us to control the surface roughness of microchannels and an increase in roughness yields an increase in the surface area of membranes. The experiments were performed under several conditions with a change in the gas flow rate, the PDMS membrane thickness and the surface roughness, which affect the gas permeation phenomena. The spatial distributions of velocity and dissolved gas concentration were measured in the liquid flow fields. The results indicate that the velocity-vector distributions have similar patterns under all experimental conditions, while the dissolved gas concentration distributions have different patterns. It was observed that the gas permeability through PDMS membranes increased with an increase in gas flow rates and surface roughness and with a decrease in membrane thicknesses, which is in qualitative agreement with membrane theory. The important conclusion is that the proposed technique is suggested to have the possibility of evaluating the characterization of gas permeable microfluidic device through membranes.