Microfluidics test

I got some new microfluidic chips to play with today (courtesy of the Microfabrication Group at TKK). This must be cutting-edge research, since there's an article about using laminar flow cells for single molecule experiments in the latest issue of Nature Methods. I'm testing our custom-built pressure controller which controls the inlet and outlet pressures between 0 and 7 kPa with about 2 Pa resolution. There are three inlet channels (~40 um wide) with blue fluid in the top channel, clear fluid in the middle, and red fluid in the bottom channel. They all meet in the middle of the chip and there's a wider (120 um) outlet channel.

The pressure controller is similar to Fluigent's (described by Fütterer et al. in Lab on Chip), and I'm gluing the 0.6 mm PTFE tubing to the PDMS chip as described by Hartmann et al. in Lab on Chip.

The video shows a sinusoidally modulated pressure applied to each of the input channels as well as varying the pressures manually between zero and maximum.