This paper looks at the design, fabrication and characterization of stackable microfluidic emulsion generators, with coefficients of variation as low as ~6% and with production rates as high as ~1 L h(-1). This work reports the highest throughput reported in the literature for a microfluidic device with simultaneous operation of liquid-liquid droplet generators. The device was achieved by stacking several layers of 128 flow-focusing droplet generators, organized in a circular array. These layers are interconnected via through-holes and fed with designated fractal distribution networks. The proposed layers were milled on poly(methylmethacrylate) (PMMA) sheets and the stack was thermo-compression bonded to create a three-dimensional device with a high density of generators and an integrated hydraulic manifold. The effect of stacking multiple layers was studied and the results show that fabrication accuracy has a greater impact on the dispersity of the emulsion than the addition of more layers to the stack. Particle crystallization of drugs was also demonstrated as a possible application of this technology in industry.

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This paper reports on solid UV cross-linked Poly(ethylene)-glycol-diacrylate (PEGDA) as a material for microfluidic devices for biological applications. We have evaluated biocompatibility of PEGDA through two separate means: 1) by examining cell viability and attachment on cross-linked PEGDA surfaces for cell culture applications, and 2) by determining if cross-linked PEGDA inhibits the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) processes for on-chip PCR. Through these studies a correlation has been found between degree of curing and cell viability, attachment, as well as on PCR outcome.

Scaled-up production of microfluidic droplets, through the parallelization of hundreds of droplet generators, has received a lot of attention to bring novel multiphase microfluidics research to industrial applications. However, apart from droplet generation, other significant challenges relevant to this goal have never been discussed. Examples include monitoring systems, high-throughput processing of droplets and quality control procedures among others. In this paper, we present and compare capacitive and radio frequency (RF) resonator sensors as two candidates that can measure the dielectric properties of emulsions in microfluidic channels. By placing several of these sensors in a parallelization device, the stability of the droplet generation at different locations can be compared, and potential malfunctions can be detected. This strategy enables for the first time the monitoring of scaled-up microfluidic droplet production. Both sensors were prototyped and characterized using emulsions with droplets of 100-150 μm in diameter, which were generated in parallelization devices at water-in-oil volume fractions (φ) between 11.1% and 33.3%.Using these sensors, we were able to measure accurately increments as small as 2.4% in the water volume fraction of the emulsions. Although both methods rely on the dielectric properties of the emulsions, the main advantage of the RF resonator sensors is the fact that they can be designed to resonate at multiple frequencies of the broadband transmission line. Consequently with careful design, two or more sensors can be parallelized and read out by a single signal. Finally, a comparison between these sensors based on their sensitivity, readout cost and simplicity, and design flexibility is also discussed.

In this paper, we present a two-phase microfluidic system capable of incubating and quantifying microbead-based agglutination assays. The microfluidic system is based on a simple fabrication solution, which requires only laboratory tubing filled with carrier oil, driven by negative pressure using a syringe pump. We provide a user-friendly interface, in which a pipette is used to insert single droplets of a 1.25-µL volume into a system that is continuously running and therefore works entirely on demand without the need for stopping, resetting or washing the system. These assays are incubated by highly efficient passive mixing with a sample-to-answer time of 2.5 min, a 5–10-fold improvement over traditional agglutination assays. We study system parameters such as channel length, incubation time and flow speed to select optimal assay conditions, using the streptavidin-biotin interaction as a model analyte quantified using optical image processing. We then investigate the effect of changing the concentration of both analyte and microbead concentrations, with a minimum detection limit of 100 ng/mL. The system can be both low- and high-throughput, depending on the rate at which assays are inserted. In our experiments, we were able to easily produce throughputs of 360 assays per hour by simple manual pipetting, which could be increased even further by automation and parallelization. Agglutination assays are a versatile tool, capable of detecting an ever-growing catalog of infectious diseases, proteins and metabolites. A system such as this one is a step towards being able to produce high-throughput microfluidic diagnostic solutions with widespread adoption. The development of analytical techniques in the microfluidic format, such as the one presented in this work, is an important step in being able to continuously monitor the performance and microfluidic outputs of organ-on-chip devices.