DVD Pick-up Based Optical Detection for Diffusive Mixing in Microchannels

초록

Microfluidics deals with behavior, precise control, and manipulation of fluids at a micro scale. It has become increasingly prevalent in various applications, such as biomedical applications, inkjet heads, fuel cells, etc. The issue of mixing in microfluidic channels is often crucial in design, fabrication, and detection of microfluidic devices. In this paper, we propose a new optical method to characterize diffusive mixing in two types of microchannels (Y-type microchannel and premixer gradient generator). In order to measure the mixing of fluidic streams, we use an optical method using a DVD pick-up module, which is widely employed in optical storage systems installed within PCs or laptops. By injecting fluorescent dye into a solution, we measure the fluorescent intensities across the microchannels in order to visualize and quantify diffusive mixing. Experimental micrographs are compared with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. We show that our proposed optical scanner can be used as an alternative measurement system with high performance and cost-effectiveness in comparison with conventional optical tools such as epifluorescent microscopes and confocal microscopes.

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