Issue 1, 2021

Dynamic pneumatic rails enabled microdroplet manipulation

Abstract

This study presented a convenient method of gathering, splitting, merging, and sorting microdroplets by dynamic pneumatic rails in double-layered microfluidic devices. In these devices, the pneumatic rails were placed below the droplet channel, with a thin elastic polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) film between them. The PDMS film would sag down to the rail channel, forming a groove pattern at the bottom of the droplet channel, when the fluid pressure in the droplet channel was higher than the air pressure in the rail channel. The groove could capture the flattened droplets and guide the flow path of them due to the lowered surface energy when they extended into the groove. We have designed different components consisting of pneumatic rails to split, merge and sort droplets, and demonstrated that the components maintained good performance in manipulating droplets only by controlling the air pressure. Furthermore, a pneumatic rail-based sorter has been successfully used to sort out single-cell droplets. The pneumatic rail can be integrated into pneumatic valve-based microfluidic devices to be a flexible tool for droplet-based biological and chemical analysis.

Graphical abstract: Dynamic pneumatic rails enabled microdroplet manipulation

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
10 ago 2020
Accepted
18 nov 2020
First published
23 nov 2020

Lab Chip, 2021,21, 105-112

Dynamic pneumatic rails enabled microdroplet manipulation

R. Zhang, C. Gao, L. Tian, R. Wang, J. Hong, M. Gao and L. Gui, Lab Chip, 2021, 21, 105 DOI: 10.1039/D0LC00805B

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements