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Controlling Capillary-driven Fluid Transport in Paper-Based Microfluidic Devices Using Movable Valve
1  Institute of Coastal Zone Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yantai, 264003,China

Abstract:

Paper-based microfluidics as a promising and powerful platform shows great potential in the past decades1-4. As a crucial and essential function component to control fluid transport, the valve plays an important role in fluid manipulation, and enhancing the fluidic capability on μPADs. This paper describes a novel strategy to fabricate the movable valve on the paper-based microfluidic devices to manipulate capillary-driven fluids. The movable valve fabrication is firstly realized using hollow rivets as the holding center to control the paper channel in different layer movement that results in the channel's connection or disconnection. The relatively simple valve fabrication procedure is robust, versatile and compatible to the different levels of complexity μPADs. It is remarkable that the movable valve can be convenient, and free to control fluid without the timing setting that advantages make it user-friendly to the untrained users to carry out the complex multi-step operations. To verify the performance of the movable valve, several different designs of μPADs were tested and obtained with satisfactory results. In addition, in the proof-of-concept enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) experiments, we demonstrate the use of these valves in μPADs for the successful analysis of the samples of carcino-embryonic antigen (CEA) that showed good sensitivity and reproducibility. We hope this technique will open new avenues for the fabrication of paper-based valve in an easily adoptable and widely available way on μPADs and provide potential point-of-care applications in the future.

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