Integrated serial dilution on a microchip for immunoassay sample treatment and flow injection analysis

摘要

This paper presents the desing and performance of two serial diluters, a 32-fold diluter performing 1:1 dilution in 5 steps and a 1024-fold diluter with ten 1:1 mixing intersections. The simualtion package SPICE was used to model the diluter as a network of parallel and serial resistors for flow ratio estimates. Study of the 32-fold diluter showed the expected linear relationship between fluorescein signal and the inverse of overall dilution factor. The dilution factor at each intersection is evaluated to be 1.80+-0.02 and 1.89+-0.05 in the two devices compared to the nominal value of 2. These results show that itnegrated serial diluters are possible and the performance data provides foundation for future design of diluters within microchip systems.