Abstract

Digital Manufacturing of Functional Microfluidic Systems: Autonomous Capillaric Circuit

David Juncker, Professor and Chair, McGill University

The culmination of digital manufacturing is the seamless manufacture of a functional device from a digital design. Additive manufacturing is now used for making microfluidic chips, but microfluidics digital manufacturing is lagging, notably because functional systems depend on proprietary peripherals and a computer, and rely on generic, mass manufactured chips. Here I will discuss capillaric circuits (CCs) which are capillary-driven microfluidics that structurally encode simple algorithms of flow events into the circuit microarchitecture, and illustrate how application-specific CCs can be 3D printed using common, widely available stereolithography 3D printers. By encoding so-called microfluidic chain reactions, CCs can be programmed to execute step-by-step hundreds of sequential fluidic operations powered by a paper only, without electricity of peripheral connections. CCs have notably been used for automating an ELISA-on-a-chip for COVID19 antibody and antigen assays, and for the first microfluidic thrombin generation assay. Thanks to a new hydrophilic resin formulation, it is now possible to download a CC design, 3D-print it – which we demonstrate using ultra low-cost (US$300) LCD printers – clean it and use it within 30 minutes. These advances open the door for distributed and digital manufacturing of functional microfluidic CCs and systems by anyone, anywhere, anytime.