3D Printed Pumpless Microfluidice And Its Application Research

With the great development of microfluidic technology, its application in the area of life science, chemical testing and environmental health monitoring becomes more and more widely. Some new-type microfluidics promise integrated solution to sample processing, assay performance and analyte detection which are fully utilized in point of care (POC) diagnostic system and play an important role in the development of world’s especially the developing world’s health care.This paper, with study of the related theory of microfluidic technology, proposes two falbrication methods of pumpless paper-based microfluidic analytical device utilizing the 3D printing technology. Related researches and experiments are performed, and the detailed works of this research includes:Firstly, the background and significance of the research are presented and the research status of 3D printing technology and microfluidic technology are introduced in detail. Further, the status of microfluidic fabrication based on 3D printing technology was discussed briefly. To satisfy the POC diagnostic system’s demand of low cost, simple equipment and good test accuracy, paper-based microfluidic analytical devices are chosen to be developed with 3D printing technology.Secondly, this paper presents two paper-based microfluidic analytical device fabrication methods based on ultraviolet (UV) curing and fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printing technology. Then the fabrication of the plane shaping UV curing 3D printer based on liquid crystal display (LCD) is introduced in detail and the structure of the Delta FDM 3D printer is introduced in brief Besides, the process parameters that influence the fabrication quality are investigated, such as exposure time, channel depth and powder concentration.Finally, a series of experiments on the fabricated paper-based microfluidic analytical device are performed. The assay of nitrite concentration is performed on both two type microfluidics to verify their performance in chemical detection. Cellulose powder based microfluidic is used to fabricate T-sensor to demonstrate its flow control capacity. What’s more, the 3D Cell culture experiment is performed on it to show the biocompatibility of the cell culture method. All the results reveal that these two type paper-based microfluidic analytical devices show great capability in all microfluidic test area.