Recording of the Surface-Driven Microfluidic Flow of Aqueous Working Liquids in PMMA Microfluidic Devices

Abstract

In this work, the pristine polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) microchannel surfaces are modified by the air dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma processing, nitrogen plasma treatment, Undoped diamond-like carbon (DLC) coating, and Si-doped DLC coating, to produce the PMMA microfluidic devices having inner walls of different surface wettability. Dyed water and dyed aqueous ethanol (90% dyed water, 10% ethanol) are the selected two aqueous working liquids. The video recording of each surface-driven microfluidic flow is recorded by a CMOS camera catching 25 frames per second with a corresponding time-scale resolution of 0.04 second. The experimental findings of this work will be useful for bioengineering applications.