| Microfluidics is the main part of Lab-On-A-Chip technology, which has great applications in pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, the life sciences, defense, public health, and agriculture. Surface condition is the most important factor in microfluidics. This research is focusing on a physical surface modification by fabricating microconcave structures on the wall of microchannel. With this special design, either air or oil can be trapped in those structures to replace part of channel wall and serve as a "wall" of the channel. Such air wall or oil wall is named as "virtual wall". The influence of this virtual is studied. Experiments show that mass transport effect and microvortices happen in such virtual wall channel. Then based on these effects applications of virtual wall such as reduction of analyte adsorption, micromixer, microflow regulator and microdroplets generation chip are designed and tested. Experiment results of these devices are very promising. |
