Inkjet Printed Structures for Smart Lab-on-Chip Systems

Lab-on-Chip microfluidic systems require onboard functionalities such as fluid pumping, heating and fluorescent or chemical sensing. An approach is presented to realize these structures by inkjet printing of functional materials or material sandwiches and subsequent curing or sintering. In detail an electro-active polymer membrane pump with passive microstructured valves, an open loop controlled ohmic heater structure for maintaining discrete fluid temperatures and electrodes for free-flow isoelectric focusing along with fluorescent hydrogel pads for pH sensing are discussed that all together are printed onto the cover foil of a polymer based microfluidic chip platform at the size of a microscope slide.