Recent Developments in 3D Printing of Droplet-Based Microfluidics

Abstract

The advent of microfluidics, especially with the integration of droplet-based systems, has led to significant innovations and outstanding applications in many fields. While this field of study has grown increasingly over the years, the conventional method of fabricating these devices has discouraged their large-scale production, making their commercialization almost impossible. This is because traditional methods of producing droplet-based microfluidics are mostly time-consuming and labor-intensive and involve multiple processes. The emergence of 3D printing has found its application in microfluidics, providing an avenue for ease of fabrication with the aim of overcoming the limitations of conventional methods. While previous studies focused on studying the role of 3D printing in microfluidics, no study has categorically focused on the application of additive manufacturing to droplet-based microfluidics. This paper reviews the various 3D printing techniques associated with droplet-based microfluidics. Furthermore, we identify the salient features, limitations, and material properties of each printing technique while providing certain projections about their future application.

Low-cost microfluidics: Towards affordable environmental monitoring and assessment

“…Different printers can be used to create hydrophobic walls that confine the fluid transport in between, most printers are simple, inexpensive, and suitable for large volume creation (mass production) (Tomazelli Coltro et al, 2014;Adkins et al, 2015). Inkjet printing is a popular printing fabrication technology, consisting of two main categories: powder based, or photopolymer based (Loo et al, 2019;Olmos et al, 2019;Aladese and Jeong, 2021;Khorsandi et al, 2021). Using this technique, hydrophobic inks are used to create the channel walls on paper-based devices (Fan et al, 2018;Lim et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2019).…”

Research progress on detection techniques for point-of-care testing of foodborne pathogens

“…It is a micro biochemical analysis system of molecular microarray. It uses mechanical arm sampling technology or microelectronic lithography technology to construct up to tens of thousands Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology frontiersin.org of different probes on the surface of a certain volume of the solid carrier to detect a variety of biological components (Li et al, 2013;Azizipour et al, 2020;Aladese and Jeong, 2021;Tahir et al, 2021). The biochip technology has the advantages such as diversification, high throughput, short detection time, and portability.…”

Deep Learning-Assisted Droplet Digital PCR for Quantitative Detection of Human Coronavirus

“…A digital PCR (dPCR) has been demonstrated as a solution to resolve the abovementioned limitations [10]. Unlike the qPCR, dPCR fractionates the reaction mixture into tens of thousands of compartments, such as microwells or droplets [11][12][13]. Since the PCR reaction is massively conducted in a small volume (pL-nL), dPCR offers better inhibitor tolerance than qPCR.…”