| Summary: | Soda-lime glass is a commonly used, cheap and accessible material. Just like any
other glass, it offers unique optical properties. Most of the incoming light is
transmitted through the glass, which makes soda-lime an attractive material to be
used in analytical and observational purposes. For this reason, glass is an excellent
source material for microfluidics practices. Microfluidics is the manipulation of the
fluids in micro-scales; enclosed microfluidic systems offers a variety of possibilities
in biochemical research, since most bio mechanism operate on micro-scale.
However, fabrication of microfluidic systems offer challenges. In this paper,
multiple fabrication methods was attempted to create a microfluidic device that can
be utilized in cell sorting purposes.
Hydrofluoric acid (HF) is a strong chemical and it is commonly practiced to
generate patterns on glass-based materials. To withstand HF, glass surface was
covered with either chromium or gold. In this experiment, two different
concentrations of HF were tested; 6% and 48% HF. Generation of deep patterns were
consuming excessive time with 6% HF, protective mask was unable to withstand
the harsh conditions. On the other hand, increasing the concentration by eightfold
decreased the time consumption by 47 times. Main findings of this study was the
usage of high concentration of HF and application of gold layer, chromium layer
was not durable enough. Flow was generated successfully within the device, sample
beads were transported effortlessly. Many of the reported methods in this paper can
be improved; however, a working fabrication method was developed.
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