Splitter Microchannel Network for Equal Plasma Flow Division on Compact Disk Microfluidic Chip

Abstract

In this paper, we present two splitter microchannel networks (U- and Y-shaped) for accomplishing the equal division of a plasma flow on a rotating compact disk (CD) microfluidic chip. A splitter microchannel including a microchannel network consisting of a straight main microchannel and two branching microchannels has been proposed. It is shown that the Coriolis force generated as the chip rotates causes a nonequal division of the plasma flow between the two branches of the splitter network when they are assigned identical geometry parameters. Accordingly, a series of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are performed to determine the optimal geometry parameters of the upper and lower branches in the U- and Y-shaped networks. The experimental results show that the optimized splitter networks cause a variation of no more than 0.2 nL in the plasma samples collected from the upper and lower branches.