Spindle-shaped microfluidic chamber with uniform perfusion flows

The reaction chamber is important due to its wide applications. Based on the idea of the bionics, a novel spindle-shaped chamber (S-chamber) for microfluidics was designed to provide uniform flow and eliminate stagnant corners for microchannels. The computational fluid dynamics simulation results demonstrate that these S-chambers have a better performance compared to the conventional diamond-shaped chambers. An S-chamber with the optimized shape, which consists of a rectangle reaction region interfaced to the inlet/outlet channel through an expansion region with smooth arc edges, was fabricated by micromolding of polydimethylsiloxane. This S-chamber was fixed into a microreactor and mounted horizontally on a synthesizer for biochemical reactions. Solvent perfusion experiments and synthetic optimization experiments for in situ synthesis of peptide nucleic acids microarray were performed. The experimental results indicate that the newly designed and fabricated S-chamber provides excellent homogeneous perfusion flows. This type of S-chamber is designed for the most convenient fixation in the horizontal direction, without the need to consider the complicated effect caused by other housing directions. It has a wide application for cell culturing, microarray synthesis, gene hybridization, and many other microfluidic system-based techniques requiring uniform flow conditions.