EMILY CHUTTER
Recent Mechanical Engineering Graduate
For our 3rd year Final Design Project, myself and a group of students created a "Lab-On-a-Chip (LOC)" system, designed to completely mix two fluids with a low cost, easily-manufactured channel pattern.
Using the detailed design, prototype chips were fabricated and tested in one of two prototype streams; with one prototype made using laser-cut acrylic and a second prototype made using molded Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). A colour sensor pared with an Arduino was used to determine how well the fluids.
Due to interior fluid leakage with the first acrylic prototype, the acrylic prototype stream was abandoned in favour of the more successful PDMS prototype stream.
The final low-cost PDMS LOC design effectively mixed the two fluids to within 5% of the expected target colour value with no exterior fluid loss.
