Baking-powder driven centripetal pumping controlled by event-triggering of functional liquids

This paper reports radially inbound pumping by the event-triggered addition of water to on-board stored baking powder in combination with valving by an immiscible, high-specific weight liquid on a centrifugal microfluidic platform. This technology allows making efficient use of precious real estate near the center of rotation by enabling the placement of early sample preparation steps as well as reagent reservoirs at the spacious, high-field region on the perimeter of the disc-shaped rotor. This way the number of process steps and assays that can be integrated on these of this “Lab-on-a-Disc” (LoaD) cartridge can be significantly enhanced while maintaining minimum requirements on the intrinsically simple, spindle-motor based instrumentation.