Transportation, metering, and mixing of picoliter-sized liquid samples were realized in a microfluidic device with a main working area of one square millimeter. The device was constructed by sealing microfabricated grooves on a chip made of poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS). Two different samples were segmented into 600-pL droplets in a microchannel with a cross section of W (100 μm) × H (25 μm), and the droplets were merged together. For acceleration of the mixing, the merged droplet was shuttled back and forth. Recirculation in a moving droplet was proven to be effective for high-speed mixing in this diffusion-dominated scale. All the handling operations were carried out using air pressure transferred through microfabricated vent valves which have been newly developed. The demonstrated strategy, including fabrication, leads to high-performance and low-cost micro total analysis systems (μTAS).
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Hosokawa et al. (1999) studied this question.
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