Electro-Osmotic Flow Control in Microfluidics Systems

Abstract

Downscaling of micro chemical systems, often referred to as “Labs-on-a-ehip”, has gained enormous interest during the last five years. The reason is the exploding research and commercial activities in DNA analysis. Chip-sized systems have proven to have many advantages over their “macro” counterparts: due to downsizing analysis often can be done at higher speed with less sample use. Besides, special chemistry can be performed which is not always possible in macro reactors due to explosion risks or toxicity for instance. Microchemistry chips have also proven to be convenient to use as shown by the Caliper chips used by Agilent [1]. We believe there is even a bigger market for synthesis chips since the advantages of analysis on micro scale also count for synthesis systems and secondly often a few synthesis steps are involved in analysis. An interesting field is chemical process development in which chemical processes need to be optimized by performing many time-consuming experiments with different concentrations. This stage largely defines the time-to-market period and the production price of medicines.