Improvements in reproducibility, throughput and capacity of microfluidic acoustic trapping systems

Sammanfattning: Acoustic trapping is a novel technology that allows for microfluidic sample preparation and pretreatment. The aim of this text is to give the reader a general insight in microfluidics with a focus on acoustic trapping. One of the next steps in the development of acoustic trapping is to promote commercialization of the technology which requires that similar devices can be manufactured reproducibly. In this thesis the fabrication steps of acoustic trapping systems were investigated to increase the reproducibility of device manufacture. The fabcrication steps were refined by improving the soldering of the trapping devices and by developing a new method for attaching the capillaries to the trapping chip. This new method resulted in more reproducible devices but also led to a decrease in overall trapping capacity for a given voltage over the piezoelectric element. Another matter of investigation in this thesis was to improve the capacity of trapping systems. The relationship between channel dimensions, size of the piezoelectric element and capacity was investigated. It was found that a combination of larger transducers and channels the capacity could be more than quadrupled.