DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN ENHANCED MICRO-RHEOMETER FOR BIOMEDICAL APPLICATIONS

摘要

The following report presents a micro-rheometer device for Point-of-Care applications, focused on blood analysis. The presented device has been developed with the aim of detecting the viscosity of any type of fluid at very low shear rates, regardless of the nature of the fluid, Newtonian or non-Newtonian. With a microfluidic device capable of detecting the fluid velocity along a microchannel and small volume of sample, the micro-rheometer has been implemented.rnThe microfluidic device has been obtained with a low-cost fabrication protocol for manufacturing soft-lithography microfluidic master molds. With the use of a dry film photoresist and a laminator, different microfluidic masters molds with variable heights have been manufactured.rnThe exposed micro-rheometer has been calibrated with Milli-Q water since its viscosity is widely known. Also it has been tested with another Newtonian fluid, such as ethylene glycol at different concentrations and with a non-Newtonian fluid such as blood. For every sample, its viscosity as a function of the shear rate have been obtained and compared with the results obtained with a conventional rheometer.