Design and fabrication of poly(dimethylsiloxane) electrophoresis microchip with integrated electrodes

Abstract

A novel poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) microchip integrated with platinum electrodes has been designed and fabricated using the Micro-electromechanical-systems (MEMS) technology. Since high voltage electrodes are integrated on the glass wafer using lift-off process, the microchip is a friendly-to-use system that does not need any extra mechanical apparatus for electrode insertion. To improve the sealing of microchip and ensure the uniformity of microchannel material, one PDMS membrane is formed on glass wafer with electrodes by pressing method. In this study, integrated microchip has been demonstrated as a capillary electrophoresis device for amino acids and satisfactory separation was achieved under separation electrical field strengths of 200 V/cm. The overall performance suggests that this novel microchip is advantageous and practical for the fabrication of lab-on-a-chip.

Low cost fabrication of microelectrodes on plastic substrate

“…To integrate micropumps, microactuators and microsensors into plastic biochips microelectrodes need to be produced. The electric field and current generated by microelectrodes provide functions, such as sorting and lysing single cell (Fiedler et al 1998), electrofusing numerous cells (Skelley et al 2009), electroforming lipid vesicles, measuring ion channel currents (Zagnoni et al 2008), manipulating and coalescing drops of water-in-oil emulsions (Ahn et al 2006), electrochemical detection (Ross et al 2001;Grass et al 2001a, b;Wang et al 2002), dielectrophoresis (Liu and Cui 2005;Pethig et al 1998) and surface plasmon resonance detection (Rajaraman et al 2006) etc. Therefore, producing reliable microelectrodes on plastic biochip is critical to the success production of plastic biochips as well as their functions.…”

Study on the technology of thermal cracking of paraffin to alpha olefins

“…The butylenes-1, hexene-1 and octylene-1 are mainly used as comonomer of polyethylene and have great influence on the density of resin [1]. Alpha olefins in the C 9 -C 16 range are normally used as chemical feedstocks for lubricants, surfactants, alcohols and other valuable commodities.…”

A plug-in electrophoresis microchip with PCB electrodes for contactless conductivity detection

“…Usually, organic materials such as polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) and polycarbonate are used preferentially to make the microchannel layer because of advantages such as ease of accessibility, ease of manufacturing and inexpensive cost. Standard photolithography and/or the subsequent hot-embossing process and bonding process are used to form the microchannel layer [ 18 , 19 ]. The fabrication processes are time consuming and expensive.…”

“…The complex manufacturing process of the electrode layer is another unavoidable problem, and is even more involved than that for the microchannel layer. Usually, typical photolithography and metal deposition or sputtering processes are needed to finish the manufacturing process and precious metals such as platinum or gold are consumed simultaneously [ 19 , 21 , 22 ]. Because of the complex manufacturing process required for the electrode layer, a lot of work was carried out by many researchers.…”