Design And Fabrication Of A Micropillar Array Chip For Cell Capture

Micropillar chip is a recently emerging micro-fluidic chip for the manipulation ofbio-entities. The main feature of this chip is an effective structure to accommodate the fluidwhich included channel, the reaction chamber and other functional components. Thestructure with micropillars in reaction chamber significantly increases the area/volume ratioof fluidic environment, improves the integration and automation on chip, and greatlyincreases the efficiency of the reaction. At the same time, it reduces the consumption ofsample and reagent and decreases the total cost.In this thesis, targeted to micropillar chip for cell capture, we firstly simulate themicrofluidics in the reaction chamber by the finite element analysis (FEA) software. Bystudying the effect of the geometry of micropillar, the arrangement of array, and inletvelocity on the pressure and shear force of the sidewall of the micropillars and chamber thatcould be critical to the efficiency of cell capture, the array is designed to keep the cellsurvival. We investigate the fabrication process for the micropillar array chip and the chipis successfully obtained by the combination of SU-8based photolithography process,PDMS moding process and PDMS bonding technology. A bio-microfluidic experimentalplatform is built in our lab. By the surface modification of PDMS chip andimmunohistochemical technology, the biological microfluidic experiments of the fabricatedchip are conducted with fluorescent label method to detect the cell capture at thesurrounding of micropillar. Both the FEA simulation and experimental results show that thearrays with more streamlined micropillars are more conducive to cell capture.