Joint Materials/Solid Mechanics Seminar Series

“Microfluidic systems for Biochemical Analysis”

Sun Min Kim
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Inha University
Incheon, Republic of Korea

Wednesday, July 7, 2010
3:00-4:00 pm
B&H Room 190

Abstract:

In this seminar two components of microfluidic systems for biochemical analysis will be presented. Firstly, active and passive micromixer devices for protein sample pretreatment will be introduced. A simply fabricated microfluidic device that has a micro/nanochannel interface enhanced the active electrokinetic mixing of two fluid streams and a new passive micromixer which uses flow variation by microchannel geometry was also investigated by experimental and numerical studies.

Secondly, two novel protein preconcentration devices will be introduced. Sample preconcentration is a critical operation required for the determination of trace amounts of analytes of interest for which the concentration in the original solution is lower than the detection limits of the instrumentation. In this research, two novel techniques, embodied in microdevices, were created. A simple PDMS device was fabricated by weak bonding between PDMS and glass substrate. Upon application of electric fields, sample concentration is enhanced 103~106 – fold in 30 minutes. Another simple PDMS device using Temperature-Gradient Focusing (TGF) will be described. High electric potential applied to the device induced a temperature gradient within the microfluidic channel due to the channel’s variable-width, and analytes were focused at a specific location as a result of temperature-dependent species mobility.
These microfluidic devices can be a component of integrated Lab-on-a-chip systems for biochemical analysis.At the end, the current researches in our group will be briefly introduced.