Li Qian, Zhang Pan, Ye Zi, Zhang Huimin, Sun Xiao, Gui Lin
Liquid Metal and Cryogenic Biomedical Research Center, Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 29 Zhongguancun East Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100190, China.
School of Engineering Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China.
Lab Chip. 2024 Feb 13;24(4):896-903. doi: 10.1039/d3lc00926b.
The application of liquid metal in a microfluidic system enables the fabrication of highly integrated on-chip electroosmotic micropumps (EOPs). In this work, a low-voltage driveable integrated parallel EOP cluster drive system is proposed. This system consists of two layers, a branch-channel layer and a trunk-channel layer. The lower branch-channel layer contains separate parallel pumping channels and a pair of comb liquid metal electrodes. The separated branch channels are connected together through the trunk channels in the upper layer. With this structural arrangement, the parallel micropumps form an integrated micropump cluster for larger pumping capacity. The distance between the pumping channel and the electrode next to it is controlled to 20 μm. To guide the pump design, parametric studies are performed and fully discussed. According to the experimental results, the micropump cluster can be driven at a low voltage of 0.5 V, and the flow rate reaches 274 nL min at 5 V. In addition, the paper finally proposes an electrode protection strategy and an integrated pump-valve drive system which is expected to solve the shortcoming of electroosmotic pumps in terms of long-time storage and driving.
液态金属在微流控系统中的应用使得高度集成的片上电渗微泵（EOP）的制造成为可能。在这项工作中，提出了一种低压驱动的集成并行EOP簇驱动系统。该系统由两层组成，即分支通道层和主干通道层。下层的分支通道层包含独立的并行泵送通道和一对梳状液态金属电极。分离的分支通道通过上层的主干通道连接在一起。通过这种结构布置，并行微泵形成一个集成微泵簇，以实现更大的泵送能力。将泵送通道与其相邻电极之间的距离控制为20μm。为指导泵的设计，进行了参数研究并进行了充分讨论。根据实验结果，微泵簇可以在0.5V的低电压下驱动，在5V时流速达到274nL/min。此外，本文最后提出了一种电极保护策略和一种集成泵阀驱动系统，有望解决电渗泵在长期存储和驱动方面的缺点。
