Effects of non-ideal fabrication on the dilution performance of serially functioned microfluidic concentration gradient generator

Presently, serial dilution microfluidic chip attracts tremendous interests due to the important applications in generating logarithmic concentration gradients in chemical and biochemical experiments. In this work, effects of fabrication errors on the dilution performance were numerically studied and several guiding principles for the device design were presented. Based on the microfluidic resistance network, channel dimension and flow rate were found to be two important factors in obtaining a stable and precise logarithmic gradient generator. Considering the fabrication errors in the DRIE process of fabricating microchannels on a wafer, placement of chips was optimized to minimize the geometrical error effects on the dilution performance.