Control of EOF in microfluidic devices is essential in applications such as protein/DNA sizing and high-throughput drug screening. With the growing popularity of poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) as the substrate for polymeric-based microfludics, it is important to understand the effect of surfactants on EOF in these devices. In this article, we present an extensive investigation exploring chang...

The electroosmotic flow (EOF) in a poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) separation channel can be altered and controlled by adding a carboxylic acid to the prepolymer prior to curing. When the prepolymer is doped with 0.5 wt % undecylenic acid (UDA), the electroosmotic mobility in a modified PDMS channel rises to (7.6 +/- 0.2) x 10(-4) cm(2) V(-1) s(-1) (in HEPES buffer at pH 8.5), which is nearly twi...

S. Devasenathipathy and J.G. Santiago The advent of microfabricated chemical analysis systems has led to a growing interest in microfabricated fluidic systems with characteristic scales in the range of a micron to a millimeter. A motivation to integrate components in a manner analogous to modern microelectronics is coupled with a potential for achieving massively parallel functions, and the fie...

A 330-pL chromatographic bed was fabricated on a glass substrate as part of an electroosmotically pumped microfluidic system. Two weirs within a sample channel formed a cavity in which octadecylsilane (ODS) coated silica beads (1.5-4 microns diameter) were trapped. ODS beads were mobilized into and out of the cavity using electroosmotic flow through a bead-introduction channel which accessed th...

A simple coating procedure employing a sol-gel process to modify the inner surface of a bare fused-silica capillary with a positively charged quaternary ammonium group is established. Scanning electron microscopic studies reveal that a smooth coating with 1 to approximately 2 microm thickness can be obtained at optimized coating conditions. With 40 mM citrate as a running electrolyte, the plot ...

Sample pre-concentration can be a critical element to improve sensitivity of integrated microchip assays. In this work a converging Y-inlet microfluidic channel with integrated coplanar electrodes was used to investigate transverse DNA and protein migration under uniform direct current (DC) electric fields to assess the ability to concentrate a sample prior to other enzymatic modifications or c...

Emerging microfluidic systems have spurred an interest in the study of electrokinetic flow phenomena in complex geometries and a variety of flow conditions. This paper presents an analysis of the effects of fluid inertia and pressure on the velocity and vorticity field of electroosmotic flows. In typical on-chip electrokinetics applications, the flow field can be separated into an inner flow re...