Monserrat Lopez Diego, Rottmann Philipp, Fussenegger Martin, Lörtscher Emanuel
IBM Research Europe-Zurich, Säumerstrasse 4, CH-8803 Rüschlikon, Switzerland.
Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, ETH Zürich, Mattenstrasse 26, CH-4058 Basel, Switzerland.
Micromachines (Basel). 2023 Jun 23;14(7):1289. doi: 10.3390/mi14071289.
Both the diversity and complexity of microfluidic systems have experienced a tremendous progress over the last decades, enabled by new materials, novel device concepts and innovative fabrication routes. In particular the subfield of high-throughput screening, used for biochemical, genetic and pharmacological samples, has extensively emerged from developments in droplet microfluidics. More recently, new 3D device architectures enabled either by stacking layers of PDMS or by direct 3D-printing have gained enormous attention for applications in chemical synthesis or biomedical assays. While the first microfluidic devices were based on silicon and glass structures, those materials have not yet been significantly expanded towards 3D despite their high chemical compatibility, mechanical strength or mass-production potential. In our work, we present a generic fabrication route based on the implementation of vertical vias and a redistribution layer to create glass-silicon-glass 3D microfluidic structures. It is used to build different droplet-generating devices with several flow-focusing junctions in parallel, all fed from a single source. We study the effect of having several of these junctions in parallel by varying the flow conditions of both the continuous and the dispersed phases. We demonstrate that the generic concept enables an upscaling in the production rate by increasing the number of droplet generators per device without sacrificing the monodispersity of the droplets.
在过去几十年中，微流体系统的多样性和复杂性都取得了巨大进展，这得益于新材料、新颖的器件概念和创新的制造工艺。特别是用于生化、遗传和药理样品的高通量筛选子领域，已从液滴微流体技术的发展中广泛涌现。最近，通过堆叠PDMS层或直接3D打印实现的新型3D器件架构在化学合成或生物医学检测应用中受到了极大关注。虽然第一代微流体器件基于硅和玻璃结构，但尽管这些材料具有高化学兼容性、机械强度或大规模生产潜力，但它们尚未显著扩展到3D领域。在我们的工作中，我们提出了一种基于垂直通孔和再分布层实现的通用制造工艺，以创建玻璃-硅-玻璃3D微流体结构。它用于构建具有多个并行流动聚焦结的不同液滴生成装置，所有装置均由单个源供给。我们通过改变连续相和分散相的流动条件，研究了多个此类结并行存在的影响。我们证明，该通用概念能够通过增加每个器件中的液滴发生器数量来提高生产率，同时不牺牲液滴的单分散性。
