Nie Minghao, Takeuchi Shoji
Department of Mechano-Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan.
Biomicrofluidics. 2020 Aug 19;14(4):044115. doi: 10.1063/5.0020531. eCollection 2020 Jul.
3D printed microfluidic devices are made of stiff and easy-to-fatigue materials and hence are difficult to have robust pneumatic valves. In this work, we describe a type of prefabricated polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) valves, named the "Luer-lock" valve, which can be incorporated in 3D printed microfluidic devices utilizing the Luer-lock mechanism. Luer-lock design has been adopted for fluidic connections worldwide; it is facile, reliable, and inexpensive. To take advantage of the Luer-lock design, we added "valve ports" to our 3D printed microfluidic devices; prefabricated PDMS valve modules could be embedded into these valve ports, in a leak-free manner, by screwing tight the Luer-locks. In the experiment, we succeeded in fabricating pneumatic valves with a footprint diameter of 0.8 mm and verified the functionality of these valves with a shut-off pressure of 140 mbar and a maximal switching frequency of ∼1 Hz. As a demonstration, we show the serial encoding of core-shell hydrogel microfibers using the Luer-lock valves. Since the Luer-lock valves can be mass-produced and the CAD model of Luer-locks can be easily distributed, we believe that our approach has the potential to be easily adopted by researchers around the globe.
3D打印微流控装置由坚硬且易疲劳的材料制成，因此难以拥有坚固的气动阀。在这项工作中，我们描述了一种预制的聚二甲基硅氧烷（PDMS）阀，名为“鲁尔锁”阀，它可以利用鲁尔锁机制集成到3D打印微流控装置中。鲁尔锁设计已在全球范围内用于流体连接；它简便、可靠且成本低廉。为了利用鲁尔锁设计，我们在3D打印微流控装置上添加了“阀端口”；通过拧紧鲁尔锁，预制的PDMS阀模块可以无泄漏地嵌入这些阀端口中。在实验中，我们成功制造出了占地面积直径为0.8毫米的气动阀，并验证了这些阀的功能，其关闭压力为140毫巴，最大开关频率约为1赫兹。作为演示，我们展示了使用鲁尔锁阀对核壳水凝胶微纤维进行序列编码。由于鲁尔锁阀可以大规模生产，并且鲁尔锁的CAD模型可以轻松分发，我们相信我们的方法有可能被全球各地的研究人员轻易采用。
