Blood separation and plasma preparation on a compact disk microfluidic chip

This paper present an available centrifugal process for rapid blood separation and plasma preparation steps on CD microfluidic platform. The new lab-on-CD microstructure capable of directly separating plasma from the whole blood into different reservoirs, and performing equal plasma flow division and decanting plasma are demonstrated and characterized. We propose a CD microfluidic platform, including a microchannel network consisting of a plasma separation microchannel network and a splitter/decantation microchannel network. A series of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are performed to determine the optimal geometry parameters of the flow division network and the plasma decanted volumes. The experimental results show that 96% separation efficiency is achieved for diluted blood of 6% hematocrit. The optimized flow division networks cause a variation of no more than 0.5 nL in the plasma samples collected from the left and right branches. By manipulating the CD rotation speed, the constant volume of plasma can be decanted into the detection chamber.