Simple and Smart Microfluidic Gel Actuator

We proposed an innovative simple and smart microfluidic gel actuator, which is made of photoprocessible thermoresponsible gel, for the disposable biomedical chip application. The smart gel is called “Bioresist”, and arbitral shape with micrometer order can be patterned on microfluidic chip by standard photolithography technique. Furthermore, the proposed actuator can be actuated only by heating microheater that is fabricated on identical chip. Therefore the actuator can be highly integrated on microfluidic chip. We evaluated the fabrication resolution of Bioresist in order to estimate fabrication limit of the actuator and it was around 10 μm. Considering this resolution, we fabricated five valves integrated on five branched microfluidic chip. We successfully demonstrated independent actuation of each valves. These results show high integratability of proposed simple and smart microfluidic gel actuator.