Highly Integrable Microfluidic Impulsion System for Precise Displacement of Liquids on Lab on PCBs

In this paper, an impulsion system for laboratory on printed circuit board (LOP) is described. The proposed system is intended to place the working liquids in a designed location of the LOP. The system is composed of a pressurization system, a microvalve, and a damping chamber. All these parts have been integrated in a microfluidic system to test the behavior of the whole system. The pressurization system allows the storage of mechanical energy to impulse liquids samples. The microvalve releases the pressure of the commented pressurization system toward the damping chamber. The blast wave effect of the microvalve opening has to be dampened. In this regard, the function of the damping chamber is to reduce the effects of the microvalve activation, resulting in good behavior. The materials used for fabricating the device are polymethylmethacrylate and printed circuit board. These materials and the fabrication process can be considered as mass production. The fabricated devices impulse 32.5 μL during about 24s, and 21.3 μL during 10 s, for the proposed microfluidic configurations. The errors for those impulsions are 5.3% and 6.5%, respectively. Finally, the experimental results and simulations show a good behavior of the system regarding liquid placement and time response.