Microfluidic system for chemiluminescence characterisation

Abstract

Microfluidic technology (generally lab-on-a-chip) has been focused area of research since 90s and the main goal of this technology is to develop different chemical and biological techniques. It is quicker than the correspondent traditional techniques and consumes small volumes of material.
One of the important functions in micro scale fluidic channels is mixing that its characteristics affected by scale because the viscous forces are more than inertial forces in this range of dimensions that provides laminar flow inside the channel; in this scale the mixing is defined by diffusion rather than turbulence.
This dissertation presents the design of a microfluidic device and employing a combination of rapid prototype technology with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) for the fabrication. After the fabrication, chemiluminescence phenomenon is tested inside the device and the resultant images from the charge-coupled-device (CCD) camera are analysed using numerical analysis and image processing.
Two sets of tests are performed for characterising the chemiluminescence in fabricated device. Preliminary tests to check the device and the chemicals’ behaviour and the actual test. In order to find the limit of detection, which is obtained as lower than 4 x 10-6 g of the dominant chemical (luminol) concentration in 100 ml of the solution, depends upon different parameters such as flow rate and the concentration of luminol are checked. The effect of the flow rate and the concentration on the maximum value and the decay length of the light intensity along the fluidic missing channels are then discussed.
In the final part of the project, nanoparticles are used to improve the intensity of the light in the channel in order to improve the limit of detection of the system.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Ali Mosayyebi: orcid.org/0000-0003-0901-6546

ORCID for James Wilkinson: orcid.org/0000-0003-4712-1697

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