Microfluidics and Nanofluidics

, Volume 17, Issue 5, pp 855–862 | Cite as

Applications of textured surfaces on bubble trapping and degassing for microfluidic devices

Research Paper
First Online:
Received:
Accepted:

Abstract

This paper introduces a passive degassing mechanism using textured surfaces to trap and transport bubbles, and then using hydrophobic porous membranes to vent out bubbles in a microfluidic system. The bubble trapping ability is achieved by creating nanostructures to promote bubble nucleation and coalescence on the sidewalls of KOH-etched concave pits in a silicon substrate. The substrate, which is bonded with a porous membrane, is placed in a liquid system with chemically generated CO2 bubbles to examine the degassing ability. The results validate that the bubbles can be easily trapped on the surfaces with nanostructures, and then vented through the porous membrane. Our proposed approach possesses the advantage of simple fabrication, great structure robustness, and effective bubble trapping and removing abilities, which show their great potential as economic, passive means of preventing the gas byproducts from blocking surfaces and improving the efficiency of microfluidic systems during operations.

Keywords

Texture Surface Direct Methanol Fuel Cell Bubble Nucleation Bubble Behavior Bubble Trapping 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

Acknowledgments

The authors thank for Prof. F. G. Tseng in Department of Engineering and System Science (ESS) at NTHU for providing nitride-coated silicon wafers. The work has been conducted in the microfabrication facility in Department of BIME at NTU. The authors also thank Ms. T. Kirk for manuscript editing. This work is supported by National Science Council, Taiwan (NSC101-2221-E-002-080-MY2 and NSC 102-2221-E-002-084-MY3).

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Bio-Industrial Mechatronics EngineeringNational Taiwan UniversityTaipeiTaiwan, ROC

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