Issue 47, 2018, Issue in Progress

New generation of spinning systems for robust active mixing on microfluidic CDs: oil/water emulsion as an evaluation test

Abstract

Microfluidic CDs (or Lab-on-Disc) continue to emerge in various applications of real life sciences, including biomedical and pharmaceutical fields. However, microfluidic CDs with advanced and efficient unit operation tools, such as pumping, valving, and mixing, need to be implemented to achieve the required applications in these fields. In this work, a novel generation of a spinning system to perform robust active mixing is developed for microfluidic CDs. The developed system is equipped with a dual-motor and dual-CD configuration to perform magnetically driven active mixing. The results show that the developed spinning system can provide a wide range of mixing frequencies independent of the spinning speed of the microfluidic CD. To evaluate the performance of this system under extreme conditions, an emulsion process of oil and water was conducted. Although the oil produced high drag force on the mixing magnet, the emulsion process successfully reached a steady state of mixing within a few seconds (approximately 3.5 s), and the mixture became homogeneous at 75 seconds. To demonstrate one of the potential applications of the proposed developed spinning setup, microparticles were successfully extracted from water to oil using water/oil emulsion on the microfluidic CD. In conclusion, mixing can be performed without influencing the integrated microfluidic components such as valves or pumps. This improvement can widen the range of applicability of microfluidic CDs in multi-step and complex processes where mixing is essential.

Graphical abstract: New generation of spinning systems for robust active mixing on microfluidic CDs: oil/water emulsion as an evaluation test

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
07 Jun 2018
Accepted
18 Jul 2018
First published
26 Jul 2018
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

RSC Adv., 2018,8, 26619-26625

New generation of spinning systems for robust active mixing on microfluidic CDs: oil/water emulsion as an evaluation test

A. Al-Halhouli, G. Al-Shishani, A. Albagdady and W. Al-Faqheri, RSC Adv., 2018, 8, 26619 DOI: 10.1039/C8RA04889D

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, 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 commercial 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