Microfluidic active pressure and flow stabiliser

Abstract

Abstract In microfluidics, a well-known challenge is to obtain reproducible results, often constrained by unstable pressures or flow rates. Today, there are existing stabilisers made for low-pressure microfluidics or high-pressure macrofluidics, often consisting of passive membranes, which cannot stabilise long-term fluctuations. In this work, a novel stabilisation method that is able to handle high pressures in microfluidics is presented. It is based on upstream flow capacitance and thermal control of the fluid’s viscosity through a PID controlled restrictor-chip. The stabiliser consists of a high-pressure-resistant microfluidic glass chip with integrated thin films, used for resistive heating. Thereby, the stabiliser has no moving parts. The quality of the stabilisation was evaluated with an ISCO pump, an HPLC pump, and a Harvard pump. The stability was greatly improved for all three pumps, with the ISCO reaching the highest relative precision of 0.035% and the best accuracy of 8.0 ppm. Poor accuracy of a pump was compensated for in the control algorithm, as it otherwise reduced the capacity to stabilise longer times. As the dead volume of the stabiliser was only 16 nL, it can be integrated into micro-total-analysis- or other lab-on-a-chip-systems. By this work, a new approach to improve the control of microfluidic systems has been achieved.