Abstract
This paper presents a simple and rapid method to measure the depth of the channel of microfluidic chip. With the depth of focus (DOF) low to few micro-meters, general microscopes show the strong axial (or longitudinal) resolving power. With the assistant of fine-adjustment, the objective was controlled accurately to focus on the channel side and channel bed respectively. Then the depth was calculated from the scales that fine adjustments turned. Experiments results demonstrated the possibilities of depth measurement with normal microscope. Compared with other methods, this method showed high degree of precision with a deviation less than 0.6µm while the magnification was 100X. This method is rapid, simple and reliable, and it is very suitable for monitoring the etching process to optimize the function of microfluidic chip.
Highlights
Microfluidic chip was developed rapidly over the past decades due to the unique advantages of small reagent consumption, short analysis time, as well as small dimension, high integration[1,2,3]
A new simple and indirect method was developed based on a combination of poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) replication and charge coupled device (CCD) imaging[4]
The microfluidic chip was prepared by breaking across the channel and placed on the stage of the stereo zoom microscopes coupled with a digital camera (K700L, Motic China Group Co., Ltd., China)
Summary
Microfluidic chip was developed rapidly over the past decades due to the unique advantages of small reagent consumption, short analysis time, as well as small dimension, high integration[1,2,3]. Fletcher et al developed a method for the quantitative 3-dimensional profiling of micro channel networks within optically transparent microfluidic device by capturing digitized microscope images of the channel network filled with an optically absorbing dye[5]. This method is accurate and non-destructive technique, it has the limitation that the microfluidic chip must be transparent and the channels are solution-filled. We introduced a simple, rapid, non-destructive method to measure the depth of channel only by using a common microscope without a requirement of optical transparency of microfluidic chip. The principle was described in this paper, and this method was demonstrated to be reliable and effective by experiments results
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