Journal
LAB ON A CHIP
Volume 18, Issue 7, Pages 1075-1083Publisher
ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY
DOI: 10.1039/c7lc01342f
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Funding
- Solvay
- CNRS
- German ministry BMBF [05K13WC5]
- ERC Advanced Grant (STREAM) [291211]
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We report the fabrication of highly permeable membranes in poly.ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEGDA) channels, for investigating ultra- or micro-filtration, at the microfluidic scale. More precisely, we used a maskless UV projection setup to photo-pattern PEG-based hydrogel membranes on a large scale (mm-cm), and with a spatial resolution of a few microns. We show that these membranes can withstand trans-membrane pressure drops of up to 7 bar without any leakage, thanks to the strong anchoring of the hydrogel to the channel walls. We also report in situ measurements of the Darcy permeability of these membranes, as a function of the deposited energy during photo-polymerization, and their formulation composition. We show that the use of PEG chains as porogens, as proposed in [Lee et al., Biomacromolecules, 2010, 11, 3316], significantly increases the porosity of the hydrogels, up to Darcy permeabilities of about 1.5 x 10(-16) m(2), while maintaining the strong mechanical stability of the membranes. We finally illustrate the opportunities offered by this technique, by investigating frontal filtration of colloidal dispersions in a straight microfluidic channel.
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