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2003
Conference Paper
Titel
Fluidic microchip for bead-based assay system
Abstract
Miniaturisation of immunoassays is a major goal of upcoming proteomics and immuno diagnostics. Analytical systems, designed for the research market, should be very flexible in terms of set and number of probes. Certainly printed or in situ synthesized bochips are used for medicum or high density biochip applications. Moreover they become very cost effective producting bigger units. Due to the high flexibility , bead-based assay systems become cost effective, producing small units of assays, each with another composition of analytes. In former work we addressed the question whether the advantages of chip-based system (use of a disposable chip, separation between chip and detection device, analysis of several hundred sites in parallel) and the advantages of a bead-based system (flexibility) can be easily combined. Building up a testing platform the question arose, how to design a microfluidic device, handling a bead solution. None of the existing simulation tools was capable to handle inhomogeneous, two phase microfluidic flow. Finding a solution for the specific task on the one hand, on the other hand we were looking for a generic approach which enables us in future to solve fluidic design problems. Therefore we subdivided the fluidic design into two generic tasks, which are 1.the pouring in of bead solution (in terms of fluidican aggregation) and 2.achieving an equal (2-dimensional) distribution. Both problems were addressed with a different approach. One approach was be to select and subsequently adapt a microfluidic simulation software, in order to take the fluidic aspects as far as possible into account. The other approach was to neglect the fluidic aspects and carry out the design due to geometrical dimension analysis only. The theoretical results have been verified experimentally. Comparing the different approaches, the required effort, the restrictions as well as the quality of the respective results became obvious. Based o these results guidelines for the design of microfluidic devices dealing with inhomogeneous two phase flow could be derived.
Author(s)
Language
English
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