A compact disk (CD) microfluidic platform for rapid separation and mixing of blood plasma

This paper presents a new lab-on-CD microstructure capable of directly separating plasma from the whole blood into different reservoirs and performing plasma mixing functions. We propose a CD microfluidic platform, including a microchannel network consisting of a plasma separation microchannel network and a mixer microchannel network. As the disk rotates, the centrifugal force causes the separation of blood cells and plasma because of their different densities. The blood cells enter a collection chamber, while the plasma flows to the downstream mixer microchannel network. Numerical simulations are performed to investigate the flow characteristics and mixing performance of three CD microfluidic mixers. The results show that given an appropriate specification of the microchannel geometry and a CD rotation speed of 1800 rpm, 90% separation efficiency is achieved for diluted blood with a hematocrit of 6%, and a mixing efficiency of more than 92% can be obtained within 3 s at an angular frequency of 2000 rpm.