Niya Wilkins
Hampton University / Environmental Science, Hosted by Fraden's Lab
“Making Double Emulsions in Thermoplastic Microfluidic Devices”
Niya Wilkins*, Achini Opathalage
Abstract
Microfluidics or Lab-On-Chip, is a technology that uses nanoliter to picoliter volumes to manipulate fluids. In this study, our focus is to make a robust double emulsion; water/oil/water and oil/water/oil using thermoplastic microfluidic devices. Double emulsion systems are mainly used in the pharmaceutical industry for drug delivery and also for encapsulating cells and proteins.
Our approach is to use Cyclic Olefin Copolymer (COC) as the thermoplastic material to make the microfluidics device because of its lower manufacturing costs, improved solvent resistance and ease of surface treatments. We report a method of making masters, creating replicas, sealing devices and modifying the surface of COC microfluidic devices. We melt the COC pallets onto a PDMS master to replicate the drop making design, perform a solvent-based sealing and bind thick PDMS sheets using silane chemical coupling for the interconnects. We have made water drops in oil and oil drops in water in hydrogenated and fluorinated oil/surfactant based systems, with and without surface modifications to COC. This study continues in developing a robust double emulsion system in fluorinated oil based systems.
Support: MRSEC REU, Nano HU Program
A National Science Foundation sponsored Material Research Science and Engineering Center
