Hydrophilic Surface Modification of PDMS Microchannel for O/W and W/O/W Emulsions

Micromachines

Shazia Bashir⁴  Muhammad Bashir¹  Xavier Casadevall i Solvas²  Julia M. Rees⁴  William B. Zimmerman³ 

[1] Department of Physics, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad 45650, Pakistan;Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, Institute of Chemical and Bioengineering, ETH Zurich, Ramistrasse 101, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland;Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Sheffield, S1 3JD, Sheffield, UK;School of Mathematics and Statistics, Hicks Building, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S3 7RH, UK;

关键词: microchannel;    microplasma;    wettability;   

DOI  :  10.3390/mi6101429

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

A surface modification method for bonded polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microchannels is presented herein. Polymerization of acrylic acid was performed on the surface of a microchannel using an inline atmospheric pressure dielectric barrier microplasma technique. The surface treatment changes the wettability of the microchannel from hydrophobic to hydrophilic. This is a challenging task due to the fast hydrophobic recovery of the PDMS surface after modification. This modification allows the formation of highly monodisperse oil-in-water (O/W) droplets. The generation of water-in-oil-in-water (W/O/W) double emulsions was successfully achieved by connecting in series a hydrophobic microchip with a modified hydrophilic microchip. An original channel blocking technique to pattern the surface wettability of a specific section of a microchip using a viscous liquid comprising a mixture of honey and glycerol, is also presented for generating W/O/W emulsions on a single chip.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.