Development of a 3D-tesla micromixer for bio-applications

The purpose of this research is to devise a new 3D Tesla micromixer, and thereby create chaotic flows for speeding up the mixing process in microfluidic devices for bio-applications. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis was conducted to examine the flow and mixing characteristics in the development of micromixers with 2D and 3D Tesla structures at different Reynolds numbers. The measured and predicted results clearly revealed that the mixing performance of 3D Tesla micromixer is significantly better than that of 2D Tesla micromixer. Because the cell-based immunofluorescence technique has been commonly employed using the specificity of antibodies to their antigen for targeting fluorescent dyes to specific biomolecule targets within a cell, allowing full visualization of the target molecule distribution over the sample. However, it still requires lengthy and labor-intensive sample preparation process. This study proposed a new 3D Tesla micromixer to perform the entire Immunofluorescence analysis protocol automatically. As compared to the traditional method, the biomedical tests by the 3D Tesla micromixer showed quite promising results with the advantages including reduced consumption of bio-samples and reagents, automation and fast analysis.