How the capillary burst microvalve works

Passive Control of Viscous Flow via Elastic Snap-Through

“…These properties may find application in microfluidic systems such as cell-sorting or, as we have shown, provide a means to protect microfluidic systems from high fluxes. Similarly, the discontinuous transition we observe is similar to that seen in capillary burst valves [27] and gas release valves [28]. A simple analysis [30] shows that when scaling down to the microscale, the expected range of snap-through fluxes are well within experimentally obtainable values.…”

Microvalves and Micropumps for BioMEMS

“…The valves can be actuated mechanically [1][2][3][4], pneumatically [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13], electrokinetically [14][15][16][17], by phase changes [10,11,[18][19][20][21][22], or by introduction of external force [23,24]. Using the method of actuation as the differentiating parameter, five major classes of active microvalves can be identified in the literature: electrokinetic, pneumatic, pinch, phase change, and burst.…”

“…Phase-change microvalves alternate between different phases of materials such as paraffin [10,11,22], hydrogels [20,21], or aqueous solutions [18] to modulate flow. Lastly, burst microvalves are single-use valves that are opened when a flow resistance is overcome [23][24][25] or when a sacrificial membrane is disintegrated [26][27][28].…”

Windowless microfluidic platform based on capillary burst valves for high intensity x-ray measurements

“…Figure 1͑b͒ shows the situation just before the valve will burst. The central performance measure of a CBV is the burst pressure ⌬p b and in previous work [12][13][14][15] the burst pressure has been predicted and confirmed to be proportional to the liquid surface tension ␥ and inversely proportional with the channel dimension D. The bursting pressure for a hydrophilic or hydrophobic channel with circular cross section can be derived from the Young-Laplace equation, and is given by Eq. ͑1͒.…”