A Battery Powered on-Chip Peristaltic Pump for Lab-On-A-Chip Applications

Abstract

Low-cost and controllable fluid manipulation in small scale is important to biomedical research, and disease testing and diagnostics. In the midst of global disease outbreaks and pandemics such as Ebola and Covid-19, rapid and low-cost testing and diagnostics have become even more crucial. Lab-on-a-chip platforms are good candidates to be applied in these circumstances due their small footprints and lower-costs which enable rapid-prototyping of these devices. However, providing controlled fluid flow handling in small scale for on-chip devices is not currently suitable for point-of-care applications due to the expensive fluid pumping systems that currently used in most of the lab-on-a-chip devices. In this work, a low-cost and practical peristaltic pump is developed using 3D printing and open-sourced microcontroller platform Arduino boards. The entire system is designed to be portable and capable of producing metered fluid flow in small scale devices. The developed device is characterized to provide adjustable fluid flow control between 1.7 µL/s to 23 µL/s which is suitable for many on-chip applications. The peristaltic pump developed in this work can be used in lab-on-a-chip applications due to its simplicity and low-cost.

Keywords

• microfluidics
• peristaltic pump
• fluid manipulation
• 3D printing

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