A flexible precise volume sensor based on metal-on-polyimide electrodes sandwiched by PDMS channel for microfluidic systems

This paper reports a flexible precise volume sensor with metal-on-polyimide (PI) electrodes to substitute for the peripheral ration pump of a microfluidic system, thus beneficial for integration and miniaturization. This in-channel volume sensor consists of multi-electrode pairs, and it can perform volume measurement of the fluid flowing through microchannels by testing the resistance variation of the electrode pairs, which makes the device possible to help automatically control the sample volume in the mixing and reacting processes inside a microfluidic chip without peripheral ration pumps. The electrode pairs of the sensor are fabricated on flexible PI surface directly by inkjet printing. Then, the electrodes with the PI substrate are transferred and sandwiched by a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate layer and a PDMS channel layer to form the flexible precise volume sensor. This method overcomes the challenge of patterning metals on PDMS and the sandwiched PDMS–PI–PDMS structure is beneficial for integration with other PDMS-based microfluidic chips. The effects of electrode-tip shapes and numbers of the electrode pairs are also investigated. A novel calculating method is proposed to obtain more precise results when different numbers of electrode pairs are used in different situations. According to the experimental results, the more electrode pairs are used in the same spacing, the better measurement precision can be obtained. The volume sensor with optimized electrode-tip and multi-electrode pairs can detect the fluid volume in nanolitre scales with the relative error of < 0.8%. This work exhibits the potential to form a total lab-on-a-chip without peripheral ration pumps.