Microfluidic Chips Controlled with Elastomeric Microvalve Arrays

Whole-Teflon microfluidic chips.

Although microfluidics has shown exciting potential, its broad applications are significantly limited by drawbacks of the materials used to make them. In this work, we present a convenient strategy for fabricating whole-Teflon microfluidic chips with integrated valves that show outstanding inertness to various chemicals and extreme resistance against all solvents. Compared with other microfluid...

Single-Cell Chemical Lysis on Microfluidic Chips with Arrays of Microwells

Many conventional biochemical assays are performed using populations of cells to determine their quantitative biomolecular profiles. However, population averages do not reflect actual physiological processes in individual cells, which occur either on short time scales or nonsynchronously. Therefore, accurate analysis at the single-cell level has become a highly attractive tool for investigating...

Elastomeric Electronics: A Microfluidic Approach

Droplet on demand system utilizing a computer controlled microvalve integrated into a stiff polymeric microfluidic device.

An integrated microvalve fabricated in a stiff polymeric (polycarbonate) device allows for formation of droplets and bubbles of arbitrary volumes and at arbitrary times of emission. Predesigned protocols of formation of sequences of volumes, intervals between the droplets and their chemical compositions can be practically and reproducibly realised and controlled from a personal computer. The de...

A Self-Controlled Microcontrolled Microvalve

Integrated microvalves are needed for a broad range of semiconductor-processing-related applications. These include precision mass microflow controllers (laFCs) for dry etch systems, miniature gas chromatography systems for real-time monitoring, point-of-use semiconductor process reactant generators, and compact control systems for minienvironments. This paper reports a pneumatically actuated, ...