LabVIEW design for electronic control of microfluidic chip

Abstract

Microfluidics refers to the manipulation of liquid in small quantities typically in the microliter range. This manipulation is highly valuable in many industries as less volume of reactant is required to produce the experiment results or fabrication. Fluids tend to behave and react differently on the micrometric scale in the experiment and are greatly affected by the ability to maintain a flow without interruption. Even in a controlled environment where most chemical and physical properties of liquid can be ad mistered, the ability of a microfluidic system to control fluid with high precision and the capability to reduce labour-intensive work is still highly sought after.

Currently, many microfluidics systems are lacking a user-friendly interface and a competent design, making the process and experiment more tedious and inefficient than required. This kind of microfluidics system tends to lead the user to an inaccurate result or a lower yield in the experiment.

The cornerstone of the project is to construct a microfluidic system by creating a user-friendly interface capable of controlling and communicating with the step motor to interact with syringe pumps with high precision. This project aims to allow flexible control for users with the use of smart logic in LabVIEW. In this paper, the work of designing a user interface in LabVIEW and back-end logic consisting of the derivation of variables required for the high accuracy control will be shown.