Design Optimization for Programmable Microfluidic Devices Integrating Contamination Removal and Capacity-Wastage-Aware Washing

Abstract

Programmable Microfluidic Devices (PMDs) are revolutionizing the traditional biochemical experiments due to their flexibility of performing various functionalities on a platform without any amendment in the underlying hardware. To enhance the inherent tractability of a PMD, microchannels are frequently shared among the operations; however, this leads to cross-contamination problem due to the residues trapped on the channel. For producing safe outcomes, a flow-level synthesis minimizing contamination as well as an efficient washing strategy become immediate requisites. Moreover, each unit of wash fluid possesses a finite capacity for washing and therefore, cannot clean the entire contaminated area on a chip. Hence, capacity-aware washing scheme is the urgent requirement to fulfil the practical constraints of a flow-layer design. In this paper, a design synthesis minimizing the amount of contamination is proposed which is followed by a model for wash optimization targeting to reduce wash time and total loss of capacity, while removing all the contaminations. The efficacy of the proposed synthesis and the washing scheme has been assessed considering various baseline approaches and the existing works on the same.