Horizontal connection method for glass microfluidic devices

Abstract

In a conventional glass microfluidic system, the vertical connection is the most frequently used for connections between a microfluidic device and its peripheral equipment. However, it leads to a significant pressure drop at the inlet of a microfluidic device, decreases the flow velocity, and can introduce few samples than expected. To overcome these problems, a horizontal connection method for glass microfluidic devices, which have advantages such as keeping pressure/flow velocity, compatible with small space, reduced sample loss and convenience for modularisation is reported. These advantages are important for high-speed analysis on precious samples such as single-cell flow cytometry. In this work, they proposed a horizontal connection method which showed compatibility with high pressure (at least 0.6 MPa) at inlet without leakage, small loss of injected samples (<0.11%), and 22% faster flow velocity along the direction of applied pressure than that of vertical connection.

An optimized PDMS microfluidic device for ultra-fast and high-throughput imaging flow cytometry

“…Horizontal connections of pipeline and microchannels had been realized in a whole glass microfluidic chip, 33 where the holes are directly drilled from the sides toward the microchannels by a drilling machine. However, this method easily causes microchannel contamination and has high requirements in machining equipment.…”

“…32 In OTS microscopy and other imaging systems, chips are always limited to the space between objectives, 17 and very long channels are always designed to avoid interference from inlets and lenses. Since the inlets could be set horizontally (parallel to the microchannels) from the side of the chips to avoid interference, 33 chips could be minified by decreasing the length of the useless channels.…”