Disposable microfluidic vacuum modules using inductively-triggered transformative polymers for point-of-care diagnostics

This paper presents a novel disposable microfluidic vacuum module using inductively-triggered transformative polymers for point-of-care diagnostics. Micropump and microvalve are the most popular devices as pressure sources for microfluidic systems. However, micropumps/valves make the microfluidic systems complicated and sometimes unsuitable for disposable biochips due to complexity in structure/assembly. In this work, shape memory polymer materials are incorporated with Nickel nanoparticles. The developed devices can be triggered by remotely inductive heating and work as disposable vacuum modules. The new design could decrease the complexity of systematic design and procedure without any circuit, electricity and actuators on a chip, it stylizes for memorizing the switch of two different geometric patterns structure in advance while synthesizing the material so as to complete the transmission. The novel disposable vacuum module presented in this work showed excellent performance in producing vacuum pressure to suck liquids through microchannels by applying magnetic field with a frequency of 16.7 kHz. Compact and simple structure makes it easy to integrate on microfluidic systems for applications in point-of-care microfluidic biochips.