Low Cost Fluid Microextractor for Lab-on-Chip

A simple and low-cost fluid microextractor for lab-on-chip (LOC) applications is presented in this paper. This device combines printed circuit board (PCB) and SU-8 technologies, achieving a simple fabrication process. The main advantages of this microextractor lie on its activation process, great functionality and ease of integration due to its planar structure. The operation is a merge of thermal and mechanical phenomena, where a membrane is melt by a resistor, extracting a certain quantity of fluid. Other important innovation is the fabrication of the whole device structure with SU-8 photoresist over a PCB. With this integration of technologies is possible to include microfluidics and electronics in the same low-cost LOC device. This design is conceived to be integrated in an array composed by several microextractors, biosensing devices and microneedles modules in order to obtain a LOC platform for biomedical applications.