Department of Electrical Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.
Sci Rep. 2020 Oct 5;10(1):16513. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-73535-w.
As microfluidic chips are evolving to become a significant analysis tool toward POCT devices, it is crucial to make the cost and the time required for the fabrication process of these chips as low as possible. Because of the multidisciplinary nature of these systems and the collaboration of many different laboratories and organizations from vastly various fields with unequal types of equipment, it is essential to develop new techniques and materials to make the integration of disparate systems together more straightforward, accessible, and economical. In this paper, we present ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA) as a new polymer-based material for the fabrication of different microfluidic chips, which brings new features and tools in fabrication, integration, and functionality of microfluidic systems. We put this material next to PDMS for comparison between various aspects of these materials. We have shown that besides the low-cost ability, ubiquitousness, geometrical modifiability, and ease of fabrication of EVA chips, due the lower hydrophobicity and lower terahertz (THz) absorption of EVA than PDMS, EVA chips, in comparison to PDMS counterparts, can work faster, have less number of channel blocking and can be used in THz biosensing application like metamaterial-based cancer detection. Finally, several devices are made using EVA to demonstrate the functionality and versatility of this material for the fabrication of microfluidic chips.
随着微流控芯片逐渐发展成为 POCT 设备的重要分析工具，尽可能降低这些芯片制造过程所需的成本和时间至关重要。由于这些系统具有多学科性质，并且涉及来自不同领域的许多不同实验室和组织，这些实验室和组织使用的设备类型也各不相同，因此开发新的技术和材料对于实现不同系统的集成变得更加简单、便捷和经济是非常必要的。在本文中，我们提出了乙烯-醋酸乙烯酯（EVA）作为制造不同微流控芯片的新型聚合物基材料，为微流控系统的制造、集成和功能带来了新的特点和工具。我们将这种材料与 PDMS 进行了对比，以比较这两种材料在各个方面的性能。结果表明，除了低成本、普遍存在、几何可修改性和易于制造等优点外，EVA 芯片的疏水性和太赫兹（THz）吸收率均低于 PDMS，因此与 PDMS 相比，EVA 芯片能够更快地工作，减少通道堵塞的数量，并可用于太赫兹生物传感应用，例如基于超材料的癌症检测。最后，我们使用 EVA 制造了几种器件，以展示这种材料在制造微流控芯片方面的多功能性和实用性。
