Design and fabrication of a polydimethylsiloxane device for evaluating the effect of pillar geometry and configuration in the flow separation using deterministic lateral displacement

Abstract

The advancement of microfluidics and the manufacturing of microdevices has led to a strategic change in the biomedical industry. The flow through narrow channels and the pillars are placed strategically, leading to the phenomenon of particle separation through deterministic lateral displacement (DLD). In such a phenomenon, the shape, size, location and orientation of the obstacles play an important role. For the first time, particle separation is achieved with DLD modules having high row shift angles of 25°, 30° and 35°, reducing the number of pillars. The significance of circular and triangular micropillars executing deterministic lateral displacement, oriented at different angles, has been investigated, and it is found that the triangular pillars oriented at 75° resulted in better separation compared to the other configurations. In this report, the fabrication, location, orientation of the micropillars and the selection of appropriate process parameters are detailed. The structures are fabricated on silicon wafers using the standard photolithography process followed by the deep reactive ion etching process. These dies are further used to fabricate the polydimethylsiloxane-based microfluidic chips. These fabricated devices are characterised by their size, structure and quality using 3D microscopy and scanning electron microscopy. Further, blood plasma separation is carried out using the devices fabricated in this work, and the particles at the inlet and outlets are evaluated using microscopy and a novel image processing technique, replacing the use of a hemocytometer. The path traced by the particles at different flow conditions is numerically evaluated and validated with experiments. The novel device is capable of separating blood cells from plasma with a recovery factor varying from 44% to 100%. PDMS–PDMS bonding experiments using oxygen and argon plasma have been carried out to evaluate the maximum bond strength and flow velocity in the devices. It is observed that the oxygen plasma results in a bond strength of 0.404 N mm⁻¹, thus a high throughput of 135.34 μL s⁻¹ is achieved using the fabricated device.