Microfluidic device for the combinatorial application and maintenance of dynamically imposed diffusional gradients

Abstract

This article reports a microfluidic device for the generation of stable, steady-state, user-defined concentration profiles for the long-term maintenance of stable diffusion gradients. The microinstrument allows both dynamic temporal and dynamic spatial control over userdefined concentrations and concentration gradients of multiple chemicals. With this device, one can create an in vitro environment capable of approximating the complex in vivo biological condition for cellular studies. In addition, the device has potential application in combinatory drug discovery, electrophoretic applications, ligand binding, etc. 3D computer simulations and analysis of arbitrary concentration profiles are presented along with experimental validation using multiple diffusing species.

Structural properties of hard disks in a narrow tube

“…The most important examples are the micro-and nanofluidic devices [2,3], carbon nanotubes [4,5], biological ion-channels [6] and adsorption in porous materials such as the zeolite [7]. To capture the essence of the rather complex behaviour of such confined systems it is important to apply some simplifying assumptions for the particle-particle and particle-confining wall interactions.…”

Investigations of the unsteady diffusion process in microchannels

“…The computed spectrum of concentration gives original and detailed information about the transitory diffusion which take place at contact with the channel walls channel. These results have potential influence on the design of novel micro-channel applications based on extraction and absorptions processes, where the control of the solute concentration gradient is needed (Smith et al, 2010) and the quantification of mixing between the contact phases is important (Glasgow et al, 2004;Sun and Sie, 2010).…”

An Integrated Microfluidic Chip for Rapid Methanol Detection

“…In recent decades, microsystem technologies have attracted significant interest among microfluidics researchers for the development of biochemical applications in food safety inspection and quality control [1,2], drug discovery [3][4][5], environmental monitoring [6,7], and biomedicines [8][9][10]. Several functional microfluidic devices have been developed to perform a variety of tasks, including sample pre-treatment and injection, species mixing, polymerase chain reaction, and cell/particle separation and counting [11][12][13][14][15][16][17].…”