Effect of Microchannel Dimensions in Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy Using Gold Microelectrode

Abstract

Microfluidic chip systems have been an area of interest for lab-on-a-chip and organ-on-a-chip studies in recent years. These chips have many advantages such as high efficiency, low sample consumption, fast analysis, durability and low cost. Today, electrochemical sensors are frequently applied in microfluidic chips because of their potential for label-free detection and low-cost production. A commonly employed electrochemical technique is electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), which captures changes in phase and amplitude as signal passes through the system under test. In the utilization of microelectrodes within microfluidic channels, noise becomes a problem in EIS measurements. In this study, EIS measurements were performed using microfluidic chips with various dimensions of width while the properties and dimensions of the microelectrodes were kept constant. It was found that the results of cyclic voltammetry (CV) cleaning and EIS experiments deteriorated when smaller than 1 mm wide-microchannels were integrated onto 100 µm wide microelectrodes. These finding sets the basics for on-chip electrochemistry experiments using microfluidic integrated microelectrodes and therefore is fundamentally important in future on-chip EIS measurements.

Keywords

• Electrochemical sensing
• Microfluidic chip
• lab-on-a-chip
• organ-on-a-chip

References

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