This paper reports for the first time the use of a crosslinked poly(Nisopropylacrylamide) ionogel encapsulating the ionic liquid 1-Ethyl-3-methylimidazolium ethyl sulphate as a thermoresponsive and modular microfluidic valve. The ionogel presents superior actuation behaviour over its equivalent hydrogel.The ionogel swelling and shrinking mechanisms and kinetics are investigated as well as the performance of the ionogel when integrated as a valve in a microfluidic device.The modular microfluidic valve demonstrates fully reversible on-off behaviour without failure for up to eight actuation cycles and a pressure resistance of 1100 mbar.

This paper describes a bead beating-based miniaturized cell lysis device that works in continuous flow allowing the analysis of large volumes of samples without previous treatment. A permanent magnet along with zirconium/silica beads were placed inside a lysis chamber fabricated with cyclo-olefin polymer (COP) by a fast prototyping technique, and the actuation of an external magnetic field caused the motion of the beads within the chamber. Characterisation of the lysis process was carried out using Staphylococcus epidermidis as the target cell and showed that both small bead size and large volume, along with the presence of Tween 20 and low flow rate, influenced significantly the device performance.Taking into account the compromise between time consumption and efficiency, 60 mL min À1 lysis flow rate was chosen as optimum yielding 43% lysis efficiency relative to off chip bead beating. Compatibility with injection moulding manufacturing techniques and capability of working in continuous flow make this device a potential DNA extraction method suitable for lab-on-a-chip applications.

This paper describes for the first time the use of alginate hydrogels as miniaturised microvalves in microfluidic devices. These biocompatible and biodegradable microvalves are in situ generated, on demand, allowing for microfluidic flow control. The microfluidic devices were fabricated using the origami technique with a single sheet of cyclic olefin polymer folded into several layers followed by thermocompression bonding. The hydrogels can be dehydrated at mild temperatures, 37 ºC, to slightly open the microvalve and chemically erased using an ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid disodium salt dehydrated (EDTA) solution, to completely open the channel, ensuring the reusability of the whole device.